AOL acquires gdgt.com | Hacker News Reader

AOL acquires gdgt.com

blog.gdgt.com

44 pointsdnyanesh21 comments

Open articleView on HN

So Ryan Block leads engadget after it is sold to AOL. Then starts gdgt and sells it to AOL.

What's next?

Obvious: he'll start gt and sell it to AOL.

Can I start spending the money early?

Sure, just borrow against your future Kickstarter campaign.

Content farm buys new field. News at 11. AOL rewording at 11:05.

It was a shame gdgt probably never caught on as much as it could have. They consistently had the best live coverage of events, which was the only time I visited their site, unfortunately.

I didn't even know they covered events—I go there simply for quick product reviews

Yeah we only covered the occasional Apple event over at our live blog: http://live.gdgt.com

But you killed it every time - especially the times where The Verge and Engadget used liveblogging platforms that crapped out on them. :)

Thanks for your coverage. Hope I won't have to follow my Apple keynotes without them.

Then again, it looks like Apple are moving towards livestreaming them, which would require blogs to adjust the way they liveblog the events.

What are you guys going to do at this point? We're in short supply of good tech writing.

Thanks! It's still really early, so I'm not really sure what's going on and if Ryan still wants to do them or not. I don't know about any other sites that run liveblogs, but the residual traffic never really made up for the massive amount of engineering and ops work that needs to go into the events so I'm not sure.

They sure are a hell of a lot of fun though.

Yeah, it was odd. They did great news coverage of live events... it did a good job of driving me to their site to look for news coverage. But the site has no other news coverage.

Man. I bet we're about to see a competitive battle never known in the gadget blogs before. Engadget vs Gizmodo was crazy, now Engadget / aol vs The Verge / vox is about to get insane.

The good news? Publishing should evolve faster because all the people at both sites are intensely great people.

Is this going to be another case of getting bought by AOL and then buying back from them after a while?

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/about-me-buys-itsel...

I wish we'd been able to do that with sphere. Instead it was sold to outbrain, and our tech was way better.

I would totally sell to AOL if they offered a price I would sell at, but I wouldn't be able to avoid the nagging feeling that AOL don't exactly have a successful history when it comes to purchasing smaller companies.

Or big companies, for that matter.

What does AOL do besides cull ad money for websites it owns while it rests on the laurels of not doing anything?

I have a good friend whom works there. I'm crossing my fingers this turns out well for all concerned and doesn't end up just being another dump-and-run type buyout.

Congratulations to Ryan and Peter. This was their plan all along and hopefully they made a lot of money.

This all seems so Incestual.

It was nice knowing gdgt. My condolences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com