Interesting profile of the hectic life of Michael Arrington, who writes the TechCrunch in current issues of Wired Magazine and recently released on Wired News: TechCrunch Blogger Michael Arrington Can Generate Buzz … and Cash. The empire and influence that is techcrunch is from the bedroom on his rented house in Calif.
And unlike most solo bloggers, Arrington has turned his passion into a tidy business. Revenue from advertising, job listings, and sponsorships now totals about $200,000 a month. He says he could have sold the operation last fall to a media company (which he won’t name) for $8.5 million, and he may still. But with a new top-flight CEO from Fox Interactive Media, roughly $1 million in the bank, and VCs lining up around the block to invest, Arrington talks like a man who wants to build an empire.
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By any measure, it has been a remarkable rise. Two years ago, Arrington was a nobody — a former attorney and entrepreneur who, at 35, looked as if he might never hit it big. Now, without a journalism background or media-giant bankroll, he is mentioned in the same sentence as big-shot tech journalist Walt Mossberg and venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz, two of the guys who backed Google. But Arrington is not only a self-made Silicon Valley rock star, he’s a textbook example of how to turn intelligence, tenacity, and arrogance into an Internet brand.