Apparently the latest flare up over Mike Arrington starting a venture fund, and still being the editor at TechCrunch has AOL who is the owner of TechCrunch and major investor in the 20 million dollar Crunchfund is coming to a boiling point.
MG Siegler wrote a piece tonight that explodes with anger, and at the same time mass confusion. It is not the type of post I expected to see, but one thing is for sure Arianna Huffington & AOL are about to put the hammer down and bring in some fresh blood.
Siegler is not positive, but thinks AOL is gonna come in and muck up the fine oiled machine. I would not be surprised if they did to be honest with you, because I have very little faith that AOL and especially Arianna Huffington can find a replacement for Mike Arrington that will not screw things up royally.
TechCrunch has been king of the hill for a while, and I am sure the mainstream media is chomping at the bit to see it go down in flames. AOL has a lot invested so we will see what develops over their. My bet is that the writers there are not going to have a very fun week and that it could be a huge opening for other sites that write about start-ups to compete for a week or two.
Update: Mike Arrington has posted and boy oh boy a line has been drawn in the sand and he is playing hardball with AOL. The message is pretty clear from Arrington to AOL allow TechCrunch to be independent or sell the site back to the share holders.
It seems like a bit of a shambles, and the fact that they did a blog post saying they are ‘absolutely in the fu*king dark’ just proves it. I don’t know why Download Squad was pulled. I think AOL are making loads of stupid decisions, but hey if the company goes down it’s not my fault.