Michael Arrington Says Someone Is Ruining His Blog
Surprise, surprise: Michael Arrington is in another internal fight at AOL. But this time the TechCrunch founder isn't slamming a sibling blog; he's dissing his own, and what some mystery middle manager or sales guy has done to it.
Arrington's new post attacks a Dell ad running on TechCrunch that completely covers the screen. "Real Blogs Don't Have Interstitial Ads," reads the headline, implying that the ad has reduced TechCrunch to a shadow of its former self. Arrington says "the ad sucks" and will alienate readers, but he has no idea who sold it, AOL or his own ad guys. No one is telling him what's going on — "so far my internal requests for more information have been ignored" — but he's trying to kill the thing, a process that "will probably involve six hours of internal meetings and at least one Power Point deck." Ouch.
It was less than two weeks ago that Arrington slammed Engadget, a fellow AOL tech blog, as a "plasticized caricature of a real blog" for running "immensely unethical" Google ads, and less than four months ago that TechCrunch was acquired. Which means 2011 should be a very interesting and fun year for Arrington's boss Tim Armstrong.
