About

TechCrunch is a technology industry news blog and online publisher owned by AOL, which hosts several annual Disrupt conferences and maintains the startup ecosystem database CrunchBase.

History

On June 11th, 2005, founders Michael Arrington and Keith Teare launched TechCrunch.com.^[3] On September 28th, 2010, AOL announced it had acquired TechCrunch for an undisclosed sum. That day, Business Insider^[1] reported that an "AOL insider" claimed the site had been purchased for $25 million.

Social Media Presence

In March 2007, the @TechCrunch^[4] Twitter feed was created, garnering upwards of 6.77 million followers within 10 years. In June 2009, the TechCrunch official Facebook^[13] page was launched, which gathered more than 2.1 million likes over the next seven years.

Features

CrunchBase

In 2007, Arrington launched CrunchBase^[11] as a “simple crowd sourced database to track startups.”^[10] Since its foundation, Crunchbase has grown into a comprehensive start-up industry database comprised of around 500,000 entries profiling a wide range of companies, people, investment funds and events, largely powered by a user base of more than 50,000 active contributors and moderated by an editorial staff. In November 2013, the CrunchBase^[5] blog disclosed that the database was receiving two million users per month.

Crunchie Awards

In 2007, the first Crunchies award ceremony was held, which honors notable startups and tech innovations of the year. On January 10th, 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg was interviewed by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington at the 4th Annual Crunchies Awards (shown below, left). In 2012, the Crunchies were hosted by comedian John Oliver (shown below, right).

In February 2016, the 9th Annual Crunchies were held, during which comedian Chelsea Peretti performed an opening stand-up comedy set (shown below).

Disrupt Conferences

TechCrunch Disrupt is an annual conference where technology startups present themselves to an audience of potential investors, media and other industry professionals. In 2011, the first conference was held in San Francisco, California and subsequent conference have been held in New York City, London and Beijing. During each conference, a different start-up company is declared that year's "winner," which has included the companies Qwiki (2010), Getaround (2011), Shaker (2011), YourMechanic (2012), Layer (2013), Enigma.io (2013), Alfred (2014) and Agrilyst (2015).

2016

On May 8th, 2016, Disrupt NY held a hackathon contest, which granted the winner AlexaSite a prize of $5,000 (shown below, left).^[6] The following day, the official Disrupt NY event began in Brooklyn, New York. During the conference, the team behind Apple's Siri software presented a "next-gen" artificial intelligence assistant named "Viv" (shown below). The 2016 Disrupt San Francisco^[8] conference is slated to be held from September 12th to the 14th and the 2016 Disrupt London^[9] event is scheduled for December 5th to the 6th.

Controversies

Crunchgate

In 2011, TechCrunch was criticized for publishing positive news coverage about startups that the publisher's CrunchFund had invested in. In September, Arrington resigned from TechCrunch amid the controversy.^[12]

Traffic

As of May 2016, TechCrunch.com has a global rank of 727 and a United States rank of 533 on the traffic analytics site Alexa.^[2]

Search Interest

External References