The blue eyed boy of tech blogging scene the world over Techcrunch has sold its entire network of sites to AOL. The acquisition amount is unknown but rumors of all kinds peg it at upwards of 40 million $ (Techcrunch was supposedly valued at much more earlier). Now this acquisition has disappointed the tech enthusiast at large as AOL isn’t the most cutting edge company in the tech scene today.
But well as you know 5 years of blogging takes its toll. Mike Arrington the founder of Techcrunch explains his decision to sell in this post. The core problems faced by techcrunch was acquiring and retaining tech talent in a company that largely focusses on writers. According to him AOL solves that as it runs engadget with several other blogs. (which it had acquired via Weblogs Inc which was purchased in 2005).
How will AOL benefit?
AOL has got an understanding of the content market as it currently owns a set of influencing platforms like engadget and several others which came with the Weblogs acquisition. Techcrunch being the flagbearer of the startup scene in the US brings several addons in terms of connections, community and a huge base of tech fanatics.
How will Techcrunch benefit?
From a brand perspective atleast in the eyes of the tech enthusiast Techcrunch is a more revered brand. And Im not surprised if lot of startup yuppies feel sad that techcrunch is being bough by AOL. The other aspect of tech support which Mike pointed out in his blog isn’t going to drive revenues but more solve his headache of managing his growing tech requirements. All in all I see little benefit for techcrunch which makes most of its revenues from conferences. Except for the money that Mike Arrington might have made in the sell off.
Indian Blogs and where they stand
So the Indian tech blogging scene is still small (in terms of numbers from a global standpoint). We (as in WATBlog) along with folks like Pluggd.in (Startup blogging) and Medianama.com (media and mobile blogging) are the 3 large players addressing the Indian audiences. There are also individual bloggers like Amit Agarwal who runs Labnol.org (But this addresses a large global audiences). Blogs have been invested in recently and Instablogs network is one such example. The challenge really is of scale and revenues. Low scale means low ad revenues and none of the players (including us) have built out a successful events or conferencing business like techcrunch (by successful we mean revenue worth crores a year 
).
The business doesn’t lie in the content monetization via ads and nor does it lie in subscription to content but it may lie elsewhere and the challenge is it balance is the media business along with another (money making) business that builds scale. Techcrunch did that with events. Will any Indian tech blog or blogging network focused on Indian audiences be able to to that? Well we will have to wait and watch 
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