AOL looking to sell TechCrunch and Engadget for $70-$100 million | Hacker News Reader

AOL looking to sell TechCrunch and Engadget for $70-$100 million

pandodaily.com

48 pointskrogsgard30 comments

Am I the only one thinking "who cares?" in response to this? I mean, seriously, tech-blog drama is pretty boring and none of this seems to have a whole lot of bearing on anything that's going on that's actually going to change the world.

I have this fantasy of buying them both and making them respectable. Of course, it would involve firing everybody currently involved.

No, you're not. Clicked the link, went "Holy shit, couldn't make it past the headline without seeing Arrington". Needless to say I'll have to find a way to fall asleep tonight without knowing the latest in the saga of the mess that is TechCrunch.

Do you really want to believe this story? Which is written by someone who is extremely bitter that they didn't get to be editor of TechCrunch and whose property really isn't living up to expectations?

“I don’t know anything. No one tells me anything. I am not in the least bit interested [in buying back TechCrunch]. I was Team Pando all the way until Sarah Lacy fired me. That does not change my position on TechCrunch.”

Can anyone explain? I've got a grasp on the business side of most of this but what role did he play at PandoDaily, and why was he fired by the founder and author of the article?

She is an egocentric person who could not handle the fact that he wanted to help both her company and TC, the brand that he spent many years of his life building. So she kicked him off the board in a completely immature way.

Not getting involved in blog politics, but Arrington/Crunchfund is an investor in Pando, TC is a competitor, the Pando Execs and board likely made a decision based on the competitive environment.

I can see for a generic company with investors A, B, and C; if B decided to get involved with a competitor, the board and execs might make plans accordingly. We've seen this in the seed VC world with express decisions to not invest in competing companies.

Basically Sarah Lacy was upset that Arrington et al would still participate in TechCrunch-related events.

Here is Arrington's side: http://uncrunched.com/2012/04/09/about-pando/

Here is a short blurb by MG Siegler: http://parislemon.com/post/20832114453/pando

Thanks, that clears things up.

Who gives a flying f---?

How the hell are two blogs worth $100m?

Yeah. The biggest tech blog in the world changes hands twice in a year for astronomical sums, while the founder starts a VC fund. All being reported on by a blog with VC ties.

No bubble here.

I think in this day and age it's best not to ask those types of silly questions.

This is the only comment that matters in this thread.

Arrington won't be able to revive it to it's past glory. The shine is off. The brand has been damaged. The power and mystic is gone.

"Actually, bringing Arrington back into the fold is a smart move for more reasons than one: One source who has expressed interest in buying the properties said raising the money wasn’t the hard part. The hard part is finding a strong editorial figurehead to be at the helm."

To me, this speaks volumes on how big the loss of joshua topolsky & co. was to engadget.

This comment reminds me of what Arrington wrote regarding yahoo (http://uncrunched.com/2012/05/07/someone-better-than-that/)

Genuinely surprised Engadget's not worth more than that by itself considering they mostly get paid for rewriting articles. The profit per article when they sucker social sites into upvoting their spam must be fantastic.

I'm really glad Topolsky and the rest of the ex-Engadget staff started up The Verge. I still like to keep up with tech news, but Engadget became a significant source of blog-spam.

Is The Verge really much better? Their original editorial content is interesting, but like Engadget, a significant number of their daily articles just rehash news found elsewhere.

> a significant number of their daily articles just rehash news found elsewhere

Part of that is par for the course - short of getting their hands on every gadget under the sun, there has to be some rehashing. They do seem to make their source links pretty clear though (unlike Engadget; a pet peeve of mine) and the ratio of rehashed content vs. reviews/commentary/etc seems much higher. It's still early days yet, though, so we'll see if they keep to that standard.

Heh, funny how the bloggers over there seem to be extremely concerned with the $70 million valuation because of the lack of substantial revenue for TC and Engadget but don't seem so worried about every other startup they cover.

I don't know where she's getting 20M, comscore says 16. And a huge chunk of that is huffpost-tech and huffpost-science, which basically can't be spun off (both the 'brands' and the tech are tied to the huffpo cms platform).

Did you hear that? That's the sound of the bubble beginning to pop.

I would like to see Arrington organize a purchase of TechCrunch. He'd bring a voice back to TC that's been missing.

Anyone have a list of potential buyers? Seems like the list would be really short.

I dunno, expecting a tenth-of-an-Instagram is stretching it.

I almost forgot that AOL was still going and running some things. I still have loads of their awful CDs somewhere.

Do we really need this type of comment every time AOL gets mentioned?

It seems that someone always finds the needs to say something along the lines of "AOL exists?", and/or something about their beverage coasters.

Probably not. But then again, if the comment I posted is what crops up every time AOL is mentioned, perhaps there is a reason for it other than purely the general level of unimaginative net-waffle that I managed to embody there.

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