Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch

gigaom.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 88 posts

Re: AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch

#71

Post by staunch »

macrael wrote: post #70
staunch wrote: post #7

"I moved my primary residence from Silicon Valley to Seattle" Hmm, that's very specific wording there. In my world, filled with tax advisors and lawyers, this translates to "I'm trying to avoid paying California state income tax on capital gains I will accrue in the near future." -- master's prediction http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1314487

Is this guy phishing? Why the link to hn.NET? Is that a sanctioned mirror? Why would I need to login again? Likely an honest mistake, but what is news.ycombinator.net anyway?

Hah! Weird. No idea how I got a .net link. Fortunately ycombiantor.net is owned by Paul Graham and news.ycombinator.net points to the same IP as news.ycombinator.com

You would need to login again because your cookie was set for .com not .net.

Re: AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch

#72

Post by macrael »

staunch wrote: post #71
macrael wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this guy phishing? Why the link to hn.NET? Is that a sanctioned mirror? Why would I need to login again? Likely an honest mistake, but what is news.ycombinator.net anyway?

Hah! Weird. No idea how I got a .net link. Fortunately ycombiantor.net is owned by Paul Graham and news.ycombinator.net points to the same IP as news.ycombinator.com You would need to login again because your cookie was set for .com not .net.

Cheers, thanks for following up.

Re: AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch

#73

Post by wikyd »

ig1 wrote: post #45
aresant wrote: post #41

I get why AOL - the cash, their focus on content, etc. But the right fit? Some of the stuff Arrington writes would probably be struck by a sales / publicly traded editing bay yah? Beyond that I would love to see a list of TechCrunch's most visited articles over the past year. It might just be the HN bubble but I feel like 2/3 of the non-fluff stuff comes from arrington's deep connections. And it doesn't just seem lik…

Another issue is embargo breaking which TC does frequently. A lot of companies have the policy that if a news outlet breaks an embargo, than that outlet _and_ it's parent & sister companies are banned from future embargoed releases. So I'd imagine AOL would have to put a stop to that.

That's very far from the truth. If TC was frequently accepting and then breaking embargos, then very quickly their sources of embargos would dry up.

TC very clearly announced to everyone that they no longer were going to accept unsolicited embargos. Their motive was that many of their competitors were breaking embargos by a few hours and then claiming it was accidental. The competitors that were breaking the embargo weren't being reprimanded by the PR firms, etc. at all. There was a clear advantage to breaking the embargo (more traffic, better ranking on news aggregators, etc.) and those who played fairly, like TC, were essentially being punished for it.

Re: AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch

#74

Post by aberkowitz »

melvinram wrote: post #3

Congrats to MA & crew if it's true. Regardless of whether people care for his style of writing or what TechCrunch has become (I don't mind most of it), it warms me up to see people who bust their asses get rewarded handsomely (assuming the payoff will be good.) I just hope AOL won't kill it by injecting content from random Seed.com writers, similar to the way Demand Media turned eHow and LiveStrong into content beds.…

They did okay with engadget and the rest of Weblogs, Inc.

Re: AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch

#76

Post by jackowayed »

aresant wrote: post #64

More interesting tidbits on this: - "A source close to the negotiations tells us AOL has tried to buy TechCrunch twice in the blog's five year history" - AOL didn't execute purchase price @ $30m in 2009 because TechCrunch didn't fully own it's conference biz, that it's since seperate from Calacanis. VIA - http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-tried-to-buy-techcrunch-t...

$30M seems like a steal. (Though I'm sure it's gone up since then.)

Re: AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch

#77

Post by aaronbrethorst »

inmygarage wrote: post #58
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, the quality of MG Siegler's writing is barely a step up from content farms.

MG is one of the very few tech writers with both intellect, style, and sass, and it's this type of writing that differentiates TC from some tech-content-wasteland. He has a voice and a following, though maybe that following doesn't reside here on HN. Saying that MG's writing is barely a step-up from content farms is like saying The Wire is barely a step-up from Cops.

Also, a better comparison than COPS might be CSI.

'Saying that MG's writing is barely a step-up from content farms is like saying The Wire is barely a step-up from CSI.'

COPS, at least, is real. Well, sort of.

Re: AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch

#78

Post by bl4k »

jackowayed wrote: post #76
aresant wrote: post #64

More interesting tidbits on this: - "A source close to the negotiations tells us AOL has tried to buy TechCrunch twice in the blog's five year history" - AOL didn't execute purchase price @ $30m in 2009 because TechCrunch didn't fully own it's conference biz, that it's since seperate from Calacanis. VIA - http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-tried-to-buy-techcrunch-t...

$30M seems like a steal. (Though I'm sure it's gone up since then.)

Ye I would expect at least $60M+ esp for a few reasons:

a) Arrington has proven that the site can still grow even with him stepping back

b) The conference business is now theirs alone and that the value in Techcrunch 50 was Techcrunch, not Calacanis

c) They can convert their readers to conference attendees, party attendees, sponsors or almost anything else - a very large, loyal and well-off reader base.

A few ad and layout tweaks could see their ad revenue rise 30%+. I also don't know why they aren't allowing readers to fire up blogs and take the advertising. I also don't know why they aren't rolling up smaller blogs (like insidefacebook, some of the social gaming blogs etc.) using their stock+cash. With a year of solid work they could double ad revenue and then sell.

Re: AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch

#79

Post by wensing »

davidu wrote: post #61
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

David - I feel he has a weak grasp on many fundamentals of modern technology[1]. His grammar and spelling are the subject of widespread mockery[2]. I must respectfully disagree with your conclusion that he has a strong grasp of the industry, market forces, or direction. I have a good deal of respect for both Arrington and Malik, and I cannot say I have one iota of the same for Siegler. He is a writer, and he is paid…

In regards to the poor grammar -- I've no doubt they prioritize posting speed in exchange for a more liberal writing style policy. In regards to his grasp of tech -- I see nothing offensive about your example. He says it's probably a bug, and it was. I think his ability to grasp the implications of tech is pretty solid. Apparently we disagree, and perhaps I even hold the contrarian viewpoint in this community. At lea…

His ability to grasp tech is missing the instinct that sees those numbers (re: the Twitter UI "bug") and immediately thinks "Oh, duh, ordered-list tag is showing numbers when it shouldn't be. CSS file error. Happens a lot when I use Facebook and static files don't get loaded properly. Not worth writing about."

Not saying that means he shouldn't write, but as a webdev it's easy to see what's wrong with that article.

Post reply on HN