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The Worst Tech Mergers and Acquisitions of Recent Times
By siliconindia
AOL and TechCrunch
In September 2010, at the San Francisco TechCrunch Disrupt Conference, AOL signed an agreement to acquire TechCrunch for $30 million, in order to further its overall strategy of providing premier online content.
The announcement would bolster AOL's position as one of the world's leading providers of high-quality, tech-oriented content. TechCrunch on the other hand was finding it hard to find talented engineers who wanted to work and how to keep them happy. AOL which runs the biggest blogging network in the world could fix the problem, and TechCrunch could focus on their engineering resources on higher end things.
Since the beginning AOL was aggressive about an important issue-the editorial. AOL allowed TechCrunch to freely criticize it, when they thought that AOL deserved the criticism. AOL had promised to give TechCrunch complete editorial independence, which the TechCrunch employees didn't feel. Huffington had informed Arrington (founder of TechCrunch) that he would be an unpaid contributor rather than a paid writer, while AOL informed Arrington that he was no longer an AOL employee (he was also told that he would be an employee in the AOL Ventures division).
TechCrunch has proposed two options-reaffirmation of the editorial independence promised, i.e., autonomy from the Huffington Post and a blanket right to editorial self determination; or sell TechCrunch back to the original shareholder.
