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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

They still have a lot of market power. To get placed in them you need to go through a marketer with contacts and that costs quite a bit of money. They publish all this junk stuff but it's just to get more eyeballs. Centralization of this stuff means that these gatekeepers become more valuable. A real pity.

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do they really matter anymore? I remember them from the pre 2010 days but even then it seemed to me like linkedin for startups just without the social network thing, i.e. suits posting boring things. These days I can't remember clicking an article linking there ever.

It doesn’t matter, but companies can still get something out of it. For instance, if you’re trying to look more credible, you could share and pin your oped, quote or brand mention from TC on social media. This might fool someone who’s just glancing at your profile to figure out if a company is legit. No clicks involved and all it takes is for the person not to know how much TC has gone downhill.

Having your brand linked to (or even just mentioned) on sites like TC is also something seo spammers swear by too.

I worked for an overfunded startup that somehow got an article in TechCrunch despite the authors not understanding what we were doing but it's fair to say that everybody struggled with understanding what we were doing.

I tried to pitch a few other stories to their writers with no success.

My favorite writer of theirs from back in the day was Kim-Mai Cutler, I spoke with her once and got the feeling she would have been very receptive to a good pitch if I had it but at that time I didn't. It's no wonder she ran off to be a VC because she developed great industry connections doing what she was doing.

Even before the acquisition, any TC article was viewed as a "negative signal" in my circles. They were a classic pay-to-play non-journalism rag for generating PR spin or, worse, cabal "take-down" pieces. They absolutely deserve all the irrelevance they've earned.

It's precisely this. But with the exception that it's a positive signal among old industries that your startup is not 2 guys in a garage. Not companies like John Deere or whatever, but some hundred-million-dollar logistics company in Europe and shit like that.

pay to play?

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