AOL Close to Buying TechCrunch
AOL, the New York-based online media company, is on the verge of acquiring TechCrunch, the online blogging network started by former attorney, Michael Arrington. The deal is at a sensitive stage and might fall apart yet, but I don't think so.
Context & Ripple Effects
AOL has been rebuilding itself as an original-content company under Tim Armstrong, and the pieces line up in sequence: it bought hyperlocal network Patch in June 2009 and opened its 100th Patch site in August 2010, after earlier buying Sphere's blog content engine in 2008. A TechCrunch acquisition would be the highest-profile move yet — Silicon Alley Insider reports AOL had already tried to buy the blog twice before.
The timing is delicate: Michael Arrington's AngelGate report alleging angel-investor collusion landed just days ago on September 22, and TechCrunch's Disrupt conference opens this week. Robert Scoble frames a sale as 'the end of an era in tech blogging,' and MediaMemo is already weighing the pros and cons — with GigaOM cautioning the deal remains at a sensitive stage and could fall apart.
First-order effects
- Michael Arrington and the TechCrunch team would go from independent publishers to employees of a New York media company, raising immediate questions about how much editorial independence survives inside AOL.
- TechCrunch's credibility as a scooping news outlet gets tested right away: it would be reporting on venture deals while owned by a public-facing corporation whose own M&A (the rumored Thing Labs/Brizzly talks) it covers.
Second-order effects
- Rival independent tech blogs — paidContent, GigaOM, Silicon Alley Insider — face both a validation of their value and a new deep-pocketed competitor, pressuring them toward their own strategic exits or scale-ups.
- AOL's content strategy shifts decisively from building (Patch) to buying audience and brand, forcing Yahoo and Microsoft's media units to weigh similar acquisitions of influential blogs.
Third-order effects
- The founder-led tech blog becomes a quasi-exit asset class: influential solo media brands get absorbed into portals, with founders kept on as talent — a structure whose tensions between owner and employer are already visible in how the deal is being negotiated.
- If portals keep acquiring the loudest independent voices in tech coverage, the industry's news ecosystem stratifies into corporate-owned outlets and a thinner independent layer beneath them.
The trend: Portal-era media companies are responding to the collapse of their legacy businesses by buying influential independent tech blogs outright rather than competing with them.