Pain of keeping the CMS updated pushed Arrington to sell TechCrunch to AOL
Well, not exactly, but when tech guru and TechCruch founder Michael Arrington explained why he sold his blog TechCrunch to AOL, his biggest complaint wasn’t the pounding hours, it was finding engineers to keep the back-end running.
“The truth is I was tired. But I wasn’t tired of writing, or speaking at events. I was tired of our endless tech problems, our inability to find enough talented engineers who wanted to work, ultimately, on blog and CrunchBase software. And when we did find those engineers, as we so often did, how to keep them happy.”
he said
Considering that the rumours are that Arrington could have sold it for a lot more – and we’re probably talking about an extra $10million – those software problems must have been a real pain in the ass. But I can totally sympathise…
Probably 99% of blog owners will be familiar with blogging software problems – the sort of niggly things that, encountered on a day to day basis make you want to grind your face into your computer screen. So yes, I don’t blame him for losing a few million $s and shifting responsibilities for gallery software, social media integration and events pages somewhere else. He promises the sell-out won’t affect TechCrunch’s editorial line – they’ll diss AOL if they need to…
AOL are becoming known as major content providers these days with Engadget, all under their management – I suppose they’re not making any money from their notoriously 90s email service these days, so a bit of diversification makes sense….
[Arrington’s explanation over at techcrunch]
