The main issue is that they publish so much. 8 stories in the past hour. I had to remove TC from my feed reader for this very reason. Even those who still follow it via feed, are mostly skimming the headlines at this point.
What they are offering, traffic wise, is literally 15 minutes of fame.
It is more than 15 minutes of fame because that blog post about a company will come up on google on the front page when someone searches for the company.
Being on techcrunch can give you long tail traffic and a bump in being viewed as "established".
The comments in the thread are making it read like getting on techcrunch isn't worth anything at all.
Also, if you get posted on TechCrunch, Slashdot, etc. you're likely to get written up on tens to hundreds of sites that just copy their content and likely to inspire many more sites (especially international) to write up reviews of your product.
After being posted, if you search for your product name you are likely to see lots of results. (People will pay for this.)
Agreed. I think there are many, many great reasons to announce news on TechCrunch. This post was merely meant to provide folks with a data point regarding how much traffic one site experienced from different types of announcements on TC.
Traffic from TechCrunch might crash your server (if you've got a cheap VPS) but it won't pay your bills.
I used to feel bad that TechCrunch ignored me, but then I realized that I need 20 times as much traffic as I could get from TechCrunch ~every~ day to be profitable. Therefore, getting into TechCrunch just isn't an important part of my marketing plan.
This comment really puts thing into perspective for me. Getting onto sites like TechCrunch and the like is useful for getting initial exposure, but it's no replacement for building a consistent user base.
the traffic value of being on techcrunch has really been going downhill...they are putting out so many stories, you only get a few hours of exposure, before you end up on page 2.
the real value of course is in other things...but still, high traffic numbers didn't hurt
It would be interesting to know how much of the traffic is on the site for only a few seconds, how many of the visitors just bounce off without reading anything.
For reference sake, the day BEFORE the most recent techcrunch article referenced, we had 11,975 unique visitors, ~5k of which were from HackerNews.
Given the traffic growth in HN and dilution in TC, for certain products, like Samurai (http://samurai.feefighters.com) targetted towards a developer audience, HackerNews is the new TechCrunch (for traffic). Some might say the new Slashdot, but more business-y.
What they are offering, traffic wise, is literally 15 minutes of fame.