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13 Oct 2010 21:49

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Biz, Tech: Rumor mill: AOL interested in buying fellow giant also-ran Yahoo

  • Good freaking god, could you imagine? Yahoo and AOL together would be like Scott Baio and Tony Danza doing a sitcom together. It’d be diminishing returns all around. It’d be a sitcom on ABC Family instead of ABC, trying its best to win a smaller audience than either star once had, and the jokes will almost certainly feel old and worn by the time they make ’em. On the other hand, we really like AOL’s current editorial-leaning direction, but Yahoo has not done anything of note since around 2000. AOL would strip Yahoo of most of the extra crap and turn it into a big advertising company. How would this work? And why is AOL acquiring so much stuff right now? And would Tim Armstrong boot out Carol Bartz? We wanna know what Alec Baldwin thinks of all this. source

28 Sep 2010 20:38

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Tech: TechCrunch sells to AOL: Now they can focus on writing

  • They run the largest blogging network in the world and if we sold to them we’d never have to worry about tech issues again. We could focus our engineering resources on higher end things and I, for one, could spend more of my day writing and a lot less time dealing with other stuff.
  • Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington • Explaining why he agreed to let AOL buy his company. Simply put – he thinks AOL’s content vision is really compatible with what the company already does. But the really interesting part? TechCrunch will be ensured editorial freedom from AOL. Arrington says that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong thought “was important that we feel free to criticize AOL when we think they deserve it. And the agreement we signed with AOL fully reflects this.” That’s a big deal. Who knows how much TechCrunch sold for? Who cares? Having such a strong backbone of support makes the whole thing worth it. source