Author Archive for Ryan Singel

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has stepped aside as editor of the blog he turned into a must-read tech publication through his tenacity and out-sized personality, AOL announced Monday. The move comes after a week of controversy that started when Arrington announced he was launching an investment arm called CrunchFund, which included a sizeable investment from TechCrunch’s parent company Aol.

TechCrunch, which AOL purchased almost exactly a year ago, will now be led by Erick Schonfeld, a longtime writer for the site. The choice of a mild-mannered insider likely cuts off any mutiny by the staff and Arrington will remain a part of TechCrunch, though unpaid.

At TechCrunch’s Disrupt Conference in San Francisco Monday, Arrington took to the stage just minutes after the official announcement to interview LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman.

Arrington addressed the change, telling conference goers, that it’s “no longer a good situation” at TechCrunch — while wearing a t-shirt that said “Unpaid Blogger” — a dig at Arianna Huffington, AOL’s editorial head, who decreed that a post-CrunchFund Arrington could only contribute articles for free to TechCrunch, as so many do for the Huffington Post.

Incoming editor Erick Schonfeld tried to keep a tight ship as TechCrunch writers wrote posts over the last week on the TechCrunch blog threatening to quit over the debacle. On Monday, he promised on stage that Arrington would remain a part of TechCrunch, no matter if he was paid or not.

Arrington burst on the tech scene in 2005 as the so-called Web 2.0 tech boom began to take off and quickly established his blog as the place for emerging companies to get coverage. Arrington distinguished TechCrunch by being an outspoken champion of start-ups and by quickly becoming the hardest working journalist in Silicon Valley. Arrington also mastered the art of courting controversy — some of which came from his dual roles as angel investor and king maker.

The switch protects AOL, which looked vulnerable to having Arrington exit angrily and simply recruiting TechCrunch’s staff to a new publication — a situation that AOL’s already encountered with Engadget, whose staff has largely left in recent months in order to start a new publication called The Verge.

Photo: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington at TechCrunch’s fifth birthday party in 2010. Credit: Robert Scoble

While Google+ or Facebook will ban your account if you call yourself Bozo123 in lieu of using your real name, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo welcomes the Bozos — and he thinks Twitter will make more money because of that choice.

“We are wedded to letting people use the service as they see fit,” Costolo said in an informal ‘State of the Union’ get-together with tech reporters in San Francisco Thursday. “Other services may be declaring that you have to use your real name because they think they will be able to monetize that better and think they will be able to get more information about you that will help them monetize better.

“We are more interested in serving our users first, and we think by serving that by serving our users first, we will have a better platform for marketers and advertisers.”

Costolo confirmed that Twitter users, which now number 100 million active users a month (defined as those who log-in at least once), will start seeing more “sponsored” Tweets. Additionally, the company will start including these Tweets in users’ streams based on who they follow and who the people they follow follow. These will show up both for those who use Twitter.com’s interface or any mobile client.

And marketers won’t care at all what screen name a person uses, since they only pay when someone clicks on a link in a sponsored tweet, respond to it or retweet it.

So even if it’s bozo1234 that clicks on Virgin America’s promotion offer, that person will use their real name to buy the ticket.

Costolo also said that Twitter is working on a self-serve ad system (much like Google and Facebook have) that will let small and medium-sized advertisers buy promoted tweets — using geo-tagging and one assumes some sort of interest or keyword targeting.

As for Google+, Costolo sounded an unworried note, though he concedes it won’t have trouble attracting users.

“There’s no doubt they will pull in massive number of users, because they are bundling it with their dominant search platforms, one of the top two mobile platforms [Android] and YouTube and Gmail and on and on. You can’t not see the little red number in the upper right corner of the fan bar, and now they are even animating it.

“But I think where we are different is we are thinking about Twitter in terms of how can we simplify the product even further, what can we take out. I think these other platforms will try to add services and we will try to simplify ours down.”

Costolo calls that the philosophy of “offering simplicity in a world of complexity.” To that end, Twitter is working on making it easier for new users to figure out how to use the service — prompting them to start with following people relevant to their interest, rather than presenting them with a box prompting them to Tweet something to nonexistent followers.

That strategy makes sense as Twitter is finding that many people simply visit Twitter.com user pages without even signing up or following people, which helps generate 400 million monthly unique users to Twitter.com. And some 40 percent of active users on Twitter don’t even Tweet every month and simply use it as a platform for reading.

Making Twitter as simple as possible to use — even for those with no interest in publishing themselves, Costolo said, is how Twitter will grow to its goal of being on 2 billion devices (it’s reached 5 percent of that goal now.)

As for an IPO, Costolo says Twitter just raised $400 million, leaving it with a “truckload of money in the bank” and that it’s committed to becoming a tech giant on its own terms.

“We want to be able to remain independent and not be beholden to the public market until we want to be,” Costolo said.

Which is another way of saying, Twitter has no intention of letting the bozos on Wall Street dictate its evolution — including the choice to let the world’s clowns tweet using any clown name that makes them happy.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was fired Tuesday, ostensibly for failing to revive the stagnant revenues and stock price of the net’s biggest portal.

Bartz promptly informed the company’s employees that she’d been canned over-the-phone:

To all,
I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.
Carol
Sent from my iPad

The outspoken Bartz took over Yahoo in 2009 after having running AutoDesk, and was tasked with cutting costs, bumping up ad revenue and helping Yahoo figure out what exactly it was. However, under her leadership, Yahoo’s stock and Valley reputation stagnated, even after Yahoo offloaded its expensive search engine backend onto Microsoft.

Not for lack of trying — or bravado. Only last April Bartz told analysts that Yahoo’s turnaround was “proceeding on schedule,” as she tried to put an upbeat spin on financial results that registered double-digit percentage declines for both revenue and profit.

But like a sort of Silicon Valley version of the Black Sox curse, nothing seems to have gone right for the once dominant portal the CEO Bartz replaced, co-founder Jerry Yang, sloppily rebuffed a $44.6 billion offer from Microsoft, arguing that it “massively” undervalued the company.

Yang stepped down 11 months later. Bartz was hired three months after that, in January 2009.

And, as of Tuesday’s close (before news of Bartz’s firing), Yahoo’s market cap was about 37% of that long-gone Microsoft offer.

While Yahoo still runs some of the top content sites on the net and handles a stunning amount of daily traffic, it’s had a difficult time turning those pageviews into Google-style dollars.

Yahoo’s product leaders continue to argue that Yahoo has streamlined its operations and remains a tech leader, but the press and Wall Street remain skeptical.

Yahoo has reportedly been looking for a successor to Bartz for months, but no replacement was announced Tuesday.

Instead, CFO Tim Morse will be interim CEO, according to AllThingsD.

Reddit, the popular news sharing site, has been spun out from Condé Nast to a standalone, wholly owned subsidiary called Reddit, Inc., as a way to let the site be more nimble and open to outside investment.

Or in terms that Redditors might understand, Reddit is no longer a subreddit subject to the whims of the dreaded, though largely absentee, corporate admin Condé Nast.

Reddit, a startup born out of the first Y-Combinator incubator class, was bought by Condé Nast (Wired’s parent company) in October 2006. The site’s traffic has grown from 700,000 page views a month to over a billion.

However, the people-powered site struggled to fit in at Condé Nast, a magazine publishing powerhouse. Reddit often fought protracted battles to get resources needed to grow, as it simultaneously sought to make more revenue from its infamously ad-adverse community.

Reddit, Inc. remains wholly owned by Advance Media, Condé Nast’s parent company, and the board will include Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, Condé Nast’s president Bob Sauerberg and its CTO Joe Simon.

Reddit has always been a lean operation but has recently hired a number of programmers — though the site still has only about a dozen employees total.

Reddit is also searching for a CEO to lead the site which has eclipsed Digg to become the premier site for geeks to share, vote on and comment on stories and funny images.

Much of the original crew that built and scaled Reddit are now working at Hipmunk, a travel search site founded by Reddit founder Steve Huffman and Adam Goldstein.

Condé Nast has already explored seeking outside investment in Reddit as a way to fund future growth, according to sources close to the company who spoke on condition of anonymity, and the new ownership structure makes that easier to do in the future.

Reddit has not, however, been kicked out of the building it shares with Wired in San Francisco (or the offices it shares with Wired at Condé Nast headquarters in New York). Reddit employees also seem to have retained their cafeteria privileges and were seen today enjoying BLT sandwiches from the Wired kitchen.