TechCrunch turned two yesterday. Like last year, I think its a good time to take a few minutes and give a report on the state of our blog network.
First, the stats. This is the 2,869th post on TechCrunch (a year ago we had just 884 posts, so the pace has quickened). 115,608 comments and trackbacks have been written by readers – an average of about 40 comments per post. A year ago we had 65,000 RSS readers; today we have 435,000. Page views over the last 30 days are right at 4.5 million, a little more than 2x last year’s rate. Technorati ranks TechCrunch as the 4th most linked to blog.
In the last year we’ve also had many full time contributing editors – Marshall Kirkpatrick, Natalie Del Conte and Duncan Riley. Analyst Nick Gonzalez has also taken a heavy writing load over the last few months, and a number of people have contributed articles as well.
Our sister blogs continue to grow. TechCrunch France is one of the largest French blogs, with nearly 100,000 RSS readers. CrunchGear has 50,000 RSS readers and is generating about 1 million monthly page views. They should become a top 100 blog in the next 6-8 months given their current growth rates. MobileCrunch and TechCrunch Japan continue to grow, and we will hopefully have TechCrunch UK back online soon.
Hiring Heather Harde as CEO was the best decision I’ve made so far. I was simply not able to leverage myself any further – writing full time, managing the other editors, selling ads and running the back office was killing me. Heather has stepped in and has brought calm to the chaos.
Heather suggested that we have a party to mark the occasion. I said it was a bad idea because we have so many other balls in the air: filling writing jobs, raising money, having a party next month and the TechCrunch20 conference in September. Heather said “ok,” planned a surprise party anyway and invited about 30 people over to the TechCrunch house last night. Pictures are up on Flickr under the tag “techcrunchbirthday2.” Many of my blogging mentors and friends were there to celebrate with us. Thank you all for coming.
The most important part of TechCrunch is the community that has built up around it. I have a dream job (for the most part) because of all of you. Thank you for stopping by, and leaving a little user generated content along the way.