TechCrunch Burning It Up

You can tell when a website starts getting pretty big and popular, they start becoming the news and in the headlines. TechCrunch.com has been in a lot of headlines and stories recently as well as making lots of headlines with their reviews of Web 2.0 companies and the industry in general.

Lots of articles on TechCrunch recently, here’s one from the Wall Street Journal,

Two years ago, Mr. Arrington, a onetime lawyer and Internet executive was living the life of a surf bum in southern California. Today, the 36-year-old has become one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley. Like a latter-day Henry Blodget, the onetime star Wall Street analyst who helped fuel the late 1990s dot-com frenzy, Mr. Arrington uses his TechCrunch blog to determine the destinies of new start-ups and to fan the flames of the current Internet boom.

Some investors worry Mr. Arrington and his ilk may contribute to an investment bubble that could end badly. In May, Josh Kopelman, an investor with First Round Capital in Philadelphia, warned on his blog that many Web companies today “run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience,” namely subscribers to Mr. Arrington’s TechCrunch blog. (The number of subscribers, then 53,651, has since grown to 133,000, according to the site.) The TechCrunch blog has also spawned its own minipublicity loop, with other bloggers rehashing many of the tidbits Mr. Arrington reports and posting photos from his backyard keg parties. Source: TechCrunch Site Makes Arrington A Power Broker

Lots of blogs, like this one, rehash TechCrunch stories because they report the news before mainstream media, such as the recent Google buying YouTube story. I myself am not interested in all of the Web 2.0 companies he covers, some are interesting, I am mostly interested in industry news, like the YouTube deal, the release of MSN Soapbox, and some of the PayPerPost paid blogging and others. Of course ValleyWag is not a big Arrington supporter, or are they, I can never tell, sometimes you can get more coverage be staging blog fights, here is what they thought in the Michael Arrington dated Miss Denmark, and other things we didn’t want the Wall Street Journal to tell us post.

Michael Arrington posted on his companion blog CrunchNotes about all of the TechCrunch hate going on,

TechCrunch is a new kind of publication. We don’t fit into a neat little box like traditional media, who refrain from financial conflicts of interest with their readers and feel that they are therefore above reproach. They aren’t, but they really, really feel that they are, and look down on blogs and other media as the unwashed masses. Yes, I’m grouping them unfairly, but the really good reporters will all soon be on their own anyway, so this will be completely true eventually.

TechCrunch is different. TechCrunch is all about insider information and conflicts of interest. The only way I get access to the information I do is because these entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are my friends. I genuinely like these people and want them to succeed and they know it and therefore trust me more than they trust traditional press.

I am an active investor, board member and advisory board member with a number of startups. That isn’t going to change. I also write about startups. That isn’t going to change, either. Obviously people like what we write on TechCrunch or they wouldn’t come back. But no one should think TechCrunch is objective or conflict-free. We aren’t. We never have been. We never will be.

All I promise is to give my honest opinion every time I write, regardless of whether there is a conflict of interest or not. Source: Crunchnotes

It’s a good blog and I think most people realize he gets insider information because he’s an insider to start with, if people don’t like it or don’t believe him, then they won’t come back.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels November 2006

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