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AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoWill they just integrate it with Engadget or how will that work out? Keep both separate but competing? Like the way Kellogg's has their divisions competing against each other like Rice Crispies vs. Mini-Wheats?
- gfunk911 16y agoThey're profoundly different blogs, don't think they're candidates for a merge at all.
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoCrunchgear is basically the same as Engadget. And yes I agree they differ, but they have a fair amount of overlap.
- carbocation 16y agoI agree with both of you. To borrow your analogy, they're like Rice Crispies and Mini-Wheats. Depending on your point of view, they're the same (wheat products consumed for breakfast with milk) or different (a frosted cereal in big chunks, versus a puffed rice kernel that snaps and crackles).
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- melvinram 16y agoCongrats 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. Sure the quality of TC isn't as great as it was in it's early days but it could a whole lot worse.
- aaronbrethorst 16y agoIMO, the quality of MG Siegler's writing is barely a step up from content farms.
- pavs 16y agoYou are being too kind.
- omouse 16y agoYeah, it's amazing that anyone pays attention to TechCrunch :|
- davidu 16y agoAaron -- MG is one of the few TC writers who editorializes pretty liberally in his posts. I appreciate that as it makes it more interesting and it doesn't bother me as I happen to agree with most of what he says. To editorialize successfully requires you to have a strong grasp of the industry, the market forces and what direction it's moving in -- all of which I think he does quite well, along the likes of MA or Om Malik. You may not like his writing but it's a far cry from a content farm. He's a writer. He's paid to write. That's what he does. I have no idea why you have so many upvotes, and I guess I'm really surprised so many people agree with you.
- pavs 16y agoWhy are you surprised so many people agrees with him? Do you think it might be possible that MG's writing is really bad and a lot of people sees it but you don't?
- davidu 16y agoI'm assuming you mean, is it possible he's right? Of course it's possible. The surprising number of votes would seem to indicate people agree with him. I don't know how many down-votes he's had though.
- aaronbrethorst 16y ago
- GavinB 16y agoI guess this is the one story on which Arrington doesn't mind getting scooped.
- swombat 16y agoGoing out on a very frail limb here, but it seems to me that MA wants to build a (small, but "his") empire, not just make money. In that context it makes no sense for him to sell TechCrunch. That said, stranger things have happened...
- melvinram 16y agoEvery business is for sale at the right price :)
- swombat 16y agoDubious. I imagine you could give Steve Jobs $100 trillion and he still wouldn't sell Apple. What would he do with his life? Buy Apple back?
- karanbhangui 16y agoSelling Apple isn't up to (just) Steve Jobs. That's not how public companies work.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- gloob 16y agoTrue, but completely missing the point of the comment you're responding to.
- alex_c 16y agoNot exactly - if we're going to have a counter-example, we should have a valid one (e.g. a privately owned company, since it's self-evident that every public company does have its sale price). Maybe Facebook a few years back?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- staunch 16y ago"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 http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1314487
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ojbyrne 16y agoWhich should give it some urgency as WA has a state income tax on the ballot this fall.
- qq66 16y agoWouldn't he have to be living in WA for a year for that to take effect?
- riffer 16y agoState income taxes are generally pro-rated on the number of days in the calendar year. The only place I've really seen the one year clock is just as something universities made up to keep their tuition price discrimination effective.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- macrael 16y agoIs 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?
- staunch 16y agoHah! 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.
- davidmurphy 16y agoArrington deserves a lucrative cash-out. He's put so much hard work into TC, and grown it into such a media force. I'd hope AOL would keep it as a separate unit. But if not, and AOL changes it, it could be an opportunity to, uh, Disrupt Techcrunch as the market leader.
- alphadog 16y agoPoor Yahoo! Always shows up late to the party.
- zaidf 16y agoDark, dark day for the Valley :(
- hristov 16y agoWho keeps giving AOL money???
- dcurtis 16y agoThe AOL you knew before November 24th, 2009 is dead. Don't make the mistake of underestimating the new AOL. It's a profitable media empire that is growing rapidly and knows what it wants. It made $500mm in revenue last quarter. Here's AOL's 10-Q filing last quarter: http://ir.aol.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=147895&p=irol-SECText&TEXT=aHR0cDovL2lyLmludC53ZXN0bGF3YnVzaW5lc3MuY29tL2RvY3VtZW50L3YxLzAwMDExOTMxMjUtMTAtMTc2MDk1L3htbA%3d%3d http://ir.aol.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=147895&p=irol-SECText&... It's hard to parse because last quarter ended the first three month stretch AOL has had as an independent company from Time Warner. It contains a ton of information about the IPO and spinoff leading up to November 2009, but if you read carefully, you'll see that AOL made $557mm in revenue last quarter, had $495mm in normal expenses, and made a net profit before tax of $62mm. Sort of. These numbers are dubious because there was a $1.4 billion charge for "unusual expenses," including a write-off from the IPO for disintegration costs and a total write-down for Bebo.com. The real balance sheet in the 10-Q from last quarter is further obfuscated by a $182mm stock purchase of AOL by Digital Sky Technology, the Russian investment firm that bought a chunk of Facebook a while ago. A few hundred pages are devoted to that and some calculations are skewed. Together, the things above make it look like AOL as a business is unprofitable, but I don't think that's true. We won't know how much the company really makes until its next 10-Q filing, but I am inclined to believe the backwards projections suggesting that AOL made profits during the four quarters prior to its IPO of $34.7mm, $1.4mm, $74mm, and $90.7mm.
- fortes 16y agoInteresting. Got any details?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- johnglasgow 16y agoIt sounds like Time Warner moved a lot of write-offs to AOL right before the spin-off to hide their own losses. Then AOL was forced to "take a bath", where you toss out all the huge one time write-offs(i.e. Bebo) in one earnings season and return to good numbers in the next earnings season.
- petervandijck 16y agoBest sentence in there: "Perhaps that’s when the announcement is likely to be made." :) Om must be pretty pleased to be able to post this news about a competitor.
- jsherry 16y agoArrington's timing on breaking angelgate was impeccable - likely sweetened, or at least helped seal the deal at the 11th hour.
- chrisgoodrich 16y agoAs much as like to see deals happen in the Valley, I'm saddened by this news. Not that I find the content of TC that compelling anymore, but I doubt that this will do anything to improve the quality of content. You can hate all day long on MA, but there is no denying that he has done a lot for the startup community. I think this signals MA's eventual departure from TC and that, to me, signals the end of TC's dominance in startup news.
- duck 16y agoI know this is different, but I still think of Reddit and Condé Nast while reading this.
- code_duck 16y agoThat sure is an odd fellowship, isn't it?
- aresant 16y agoI 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 like Arrington playing "founder" rolling out the big news, it seems like genuinely developing from his passion for the tech space. After his extended vacation a few years ago, and the thoughts he expressed on loving / hating / being exhausted w/TechCrunch I can't imagine he's going to stick around. Examples of other blogs built on a founders passion that made it through an aquistion (EG discluding Weblogs topical gossip rags)?
- ig1 16y agoAnother 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.
- wikyd 16y agoThat'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.
- ig1 16y agoAccording to Valleywag, MA turned down a $20 million offer in 2008: http://valleywag.gawker.com/5024888/aol-wants-to-buy-techcrunch-at-a-70-percent-discount-to-arringtons-nine+figure-price-tag http://valleywag.gawker.com/5024888/aol-wants-to-buy-techcru...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- abalashov 16y agoThat's a pretty toxic acquisition.
- wilschroter 16y agoIf not AOL, who would be the most likely (i.e. biggest cash out) for TC?
- Zakuzaa 16y agoMy guess: $50 Million What do you say?
- mpat 16y agoWhat's the best estimate on their revenue?
- Zakuzaa 16y ago$10 million per year (I read it somewhere, not sure)
- petenixey 16y agoI would suspect much higher than that. TC was rumoured to be making over $10m a year even 4 years ago before their conferences and Crunch Gear etc. It's a solid blog network and still growing in influence and mediums (TCTV, Disrupt etc). Given how much stick MA gave entrepreneurs for not swinging for the fences in the angelgate panel this morning I would guess over $100m.
- petenixey 16y agoLooks like maybe I was wrong
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- dstein 16y agoQ: How do you know you're in a bubble? A: When AOL wants to buy your blog.
- aresant 16y agoMore 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-twice-before-2010-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-tried-to-buy-techcrunch-t...
- jackowayed 16y ago$30M seems like a steal. (Though I'm sure it's gone up since then.)
- bl4k 16y agoYe 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.
- betaPass 16y agowhat value would AOL get from the aquisition??
- ck2 16y agoHasn't AOL basically destroyed anything they bought? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL Or at least let dust grow and cover them.
- markkat 16y agoGreat News for MA, bad news for TC readers. I hope Mike's ego prevents them from making TC go lame. No doubt he will have a non-compete if he totally cashes out. :(
- skbohra123 16y agoConfirmed: http://twitter.com/Sequoia_Capital/status/25800338477 http://twitter.com/Sequoia_Capital/status/25800338477