Alltop.com

I was on TechCrunch about two years ago. A small startup of mine won a contest, got a small shout out on a blog post, and got a free square button placement for a month. Apparently it was a $1,500 value or some such.

We didn't really get a lot of traffic. I was pretty underwhelmed. I think that advertising on TC suffers from the same problem that advertising directly on Twitter does: The people you are advertising to are advertisers themselves.

The only way I can see advertising or being featured on TC to be really valuable is if you provide a service FOR entrepreneurs and startups. If say, you're Slicehost and you are going to give an awesome deal on VPS hosting solutions that let you run as root. That's a valuable piece of information that the people who read TC daily might want to know about.

I mentioned Twitter above, only because I see the same kind of thing happening there, specifically with people in marketing an advertising. People think that having a lot of followers on Twitter is valuable, but if all those followers are just marketers themselves... who cares?

Hey Guy - same experience here http://www.bytesurgery.com/blog/2009/06/02/launch-day-stats/ on our launch day.

Guy, marketing.alltop.com is continually crashing FF, slowing down IE. Thought you'd want to know...

This is true for any media coverage in any industry I believe. I had a lovely spread done in Australia's BRW Business Review Weekly last year, no cost, but in an editorial-article area, connected to resilience in entrepreneurship. Despite this, there was no demonstrable outcome (eg hits, enquiries for services) as the article a) didn't push any USP, and b) fitted a coffee table edition. I hoped for a little interest but unless you can hit the mark with what you do, and when prospective clients need it, it is purely "presence" stuff.

The value of TC is not purely in the numbers but in the quality of those numbers. TC commands a good mindshare of the early-adopters. Hence, the number of clicks may be small - but may actually turn out to be of very high quality. Now, how do you judge that??? Clicks converting into sign-ups, maybe!

Agree with Aaron. Techcrunch spike is very transient - unless your product is very relevant to early adopters.

Like any publicity campaign to launch a company or product, there are media you are targeting because your customers are reading that paper or blog and you want them to buy your product or service. However, in my experience clients want to appear in 'big name' publications because being covered there means they have 'arrived'.

I think there's value in this depending on what you are trying to achieve in your campaign. Appearing in TechCrunch or similar pubs may not bring you the traffic or sales initially, but the credibility it builds for your company is longer lasting and may attract employees, joint venture partners or investors who would otherwise never hear about you.

Plus, it's a snowball effect. More reporters will write about you (everyone reads each other's paper or blog) which leads to more opportunities you haven't even thought about!

I've been part of several campaigns where the PR may not have produced stellar sales or traffic, but attracted a buyer for the company. It was certainly an unexpected result but welcomed by company owners anyway.