TechCrunch’s Problems Are More Existential

If there were an easy way for me to track my early web browser history, I’d likely find that I was reading TechCrunch within a year or two of its launch in 2005. I remember being enamored with how prolific the early team was, especially as I was trying to build my own blogs in college. I recognized the brand so much that I felt genuinely excited when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington spoke at one of CoinDesk’s events (where I was working at the time).

Since then, though, I’ve lost interest in the brand. I can’t identify why, but I found myself not reading much of the content. And so, it piqued my interest when Adweek reported last week that TechCrunch had decided to shut down its subscription product, TC+. According to the story:

Technology publisher TechCrunch laid off around eight staff members Monday, part of a larger restructuring at the title as it seeks to refocus its coverage around the investors, founders and startups of Silicon Valley, according to an internal memo obtained by Adweek.

…

“We’ll be sunsetting the TechCrunch+ subscription product in the coming weeks and will refocus our talented writers and editors on strengthening our core product,” [editor in chief Connie] Loizos wrote. “Building around two businesses hasn’t allowed us to focus where we can win.”

I wrote about TC+ back in 2019, saying:

The niche TechCrunch identified was the number of startup founders that read TechCrunch that needs information on running a startup. Rather than trying to use breaking news as the hook to get a user to subscribe, they created evergreen-like content that touched on pain points founders might be feeling.

At the time, I thought the subscription product made sense. Startup founders needed good information to help them as they grew their businesses, and TechCrunch had, theoretically, gained a strong association with that audience. While we don’t know how the subscription business was doing when it was shut down, it’s clear that the product didn’t work. Profitable businesses don’t often get shuttered.

A story like this would not have typically warranted my writing an article, but the founding editor of TC+, Danny Crichton, who’s now at Lux Capital, wrote a piece breaking down both the business model of TechCrunch and the overall problems for the business. I’d recommend reading the entire piece, if for no other reason than it articulates rather nicely the standard B2B media play.

However, while reading it, I couldn’t help feeling as if Crichton was unintentionally writing an obituary for the entirety of TechCrunch. And there are a number of reasons for that, but I’ll start with this one. Crichton writes:

Matching those revenues was a structural advantage in terms of traffic. As one of the most venerable sites covering tech on the web, major announcements from Elon Musk, Tesla, Apple, Facebook and other big technology companies drove heavy traffic to TechCrunch. Most of this was relayed via Google Search and Google News, and at times, more than 90% of the site’s traffic came from just those two sources. Critically, this coverage was eminently affordable. Writing up an article on the latest ravings of Elon Musk might take about 15 minutes (there usually wasn’t that much to say other than his statement, after all), but that one article could drive 100,000 page views or more. That was the secret treasure that funded the real in-depth reporting: cheap coverage of a big tech company coupled with the lucre of comparatively extraordinary ad revenue.

TechCrunch didn’t actually have an audience. It had a lot of traffic. If over 90% of your traffic is coming from Google Search and Google News, you are not a sustainable business. You operate at the whims of a platform, and incentives will force you to create content for that platform, which is basically what Crichton goes on to explain:

For the business side, TechCrunch’s focus on startups required second-order thinking. Startup-related articles got a fraction of the readership of an article on Apple, since no one is searching on Google for the name of a startup they have never heard of before. So why bother? Indeed, many of TechCrunch’s now-dead competitors didn’t bother. The key insight though is that these articles attract the startup CEOs and founders, and it is precisely this demographic that is so valuable for advertisers. Startup coverage was a form of service journalism, and one that happened to create a perpetual revenue machine.

This perfectly sums up the problem with TechCrunch. It wanted to serve the startup founder, but it was addicted to the traffic that came from covering things only tangentially related to this persona: Apple, Facebook, and the other big tech companies that were the antithesis to the startup founder. Advertisers thought they were getting startup founders, but instead, they were getting random people who cared about big companies. That’s not a recipe for a successful business. At all.

Who you create content for matters. If you cannot clearly articulate that audience or you are investing resources in creating content simply because it “could drive 100,000 page views or more,” then you’re at risk. You can also see this with the business model. As far as I can tell, TechCrunch offers none of the standard B2B ad products, like lead generation, webinars, whitepapers, etc. Instead, it’s primarily prosumer—a niche, business topics, but with a consumer audience—programmatic advertising and brand content. The business model follows the audience.

Yet, let’s take even one bigger step back. Does TechCrunch even need to exist? The brand launched three years after the tech bubble had bottomed out in 2002. Silicon Valley was fascinating. Startups were alluring. Facebook was just getting its start. Google had IPO’d only a year prior. Startup founders were an unknown entity and there were few good sources covering them.

But today, startup founders are everywhere. Nearly every business publication out there has some sort of an “innovation” event where it brings the up-and-coming startups to the table. Publications about respective industries cover their startup scene. Is it a travel startup? Go read Skift. Is it a biotech one? Go read Endpoints. Trucking and logistics? FreightWaves has you. The founders are going to be reading the publications about the industries they’re looking to disrupt, not a general one that covers the concept of a startup.

It almost feels like the end of an era. At one point, we needed publications to cover the internet. The Industry Standard made a ton of money in a short period of time. But as time went on, every company became an internet company, so having a dedicated publication became less necessary. As startups become more tightly linked to their industry versus the stage of their business, is the era of TechCrunch-style startup coverage also coming to an end?

Can TechCrunch survive from here? I don’t see why not. It’s events business still does very well. And I suspect there is a subset of the audience that cares about startups irrespective of their industry. For example, venture capital space invests across categories. However, I’m not terribly confident. TechCrunch is a niche media play, but it’s owned by a mass-scale media company. The business models are not aligned and it’s easy to imagine Yahoo continuing to force TechCrunch to chase more pageviews. In this new era of media, that strategy won’t work.

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