Hacker News Reader

Comment by furyg3 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, everything I've ever seen with regard to Arrington or TC has been surrounded in "drama" and hype, both things I'd rather simply avoid.

I truly don't understand the appeal, but I'm curious... Are there any hackers out there who think that TC provides any form of intriguing technical commentary? Or that he's a legitimate "visionary/evangelist" in things dot-com?

If the answer to both is "no", what's left? Why do we have so many TC stories?

View on HN

  Are there any hackers out there who think that 
  TC provides any form of intriguing technical commentary?

You are making two assumptions here: 1. Hackers are only into technical commentary 2. TC promises technical commentary and under delivers

I don't think either of them are true. For a lot of us, particularly those doing startups, an article on TC about our company can be worth many times more than frontpage NYT story. I say that from experience.

Even if you dislike TC's content, dismissing its potential value to your business would be stupid.

What has been the value of being on TC for you?

I've had a number of startups get their post on TC, which resulted in tons of clicks on our homepage, and basically nothing beyond that. These startups ranged from VC funded to boot strap, and I can't really say the "publicity" we received was useful in any way.

FWIW, we got funded because of our TC coverage. Our investor (a Silicon Valley VC) called us the day of the post. 2 months later, the money was in our accounts.

Top two things:

1. We got incredible SEO out of it. As a result of TC, we got on top of digg/reddit. Each of those gave us dozens of more linkbacks. This significantly helped us with our seo strategy that got us sustained 80-90,000/uniques a day within 3 months.

2. We got into ycombinator. I believe without getting onto TC, it would be very hard to get traction. And without traction, a site like ours would be a very tough sell(as much to ourselves as to investors)

Before we launched, our 3 month plan was to get on TC. That we got on it a few days after launch put us way ahead.

The appeal of TC (for me atleast) is that they produce a lot of content. The subjective nature of the content is one aspect I won't address, but the simple fact is that they are very active reporters. Like it or not, it is often the first place I hear about up and coming startups.

I like the subjective nature - you don't have to beat around the bush to find what the editorial staff's (!) position is it's plain as your nose right there.

Yes, TechCrunch is great and has a substantial position in our vague industry. Arrington has almost single handedly resulted in a spotlight being cast onto us that simply didn't exist before. I'm not saying someone else couldn't have done it, and maybe perhaps better, but Arrington was the one to step forward to the plate and TC has done a lot more good for our industry than bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com