Someone Made A TechCrunch Parody Site And It’s Hilarious

Something odd popped up in my Facebook Newsfeed over the weekend:

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Notice the link in this post says “Trapcrunch.com.” Someone went and launched an Onion-like imitation of our site.

TrapCrunch.com, a clear parody to TechCrunch, claims in its WhoIs tagline to be, “Breaking technology news from verified sources.”

The site was registered just 10 days ago by someone who might live near the Lower Nob Hill portion of San Francisco. Just follow this link and you can get a contact for the person behind the site (we’ve reached out via email and are waiting to hear back to verify. Update: Verified).

There are just 5 articles up on the site so far, with silly titles like “Facebook Launches Hey, A Disruptive Simple App” and, “Popcorn Time Now Delivering Popcorn.” The style and content of the site are clearly poking fun at TechCrunch. The latest, that aforementioned “Hey” article, seems to be a jab at our “Yo” coverage storm this last week.

According to inner sources, Hey was designed and coded overnight by Mr. Zuckerberg himself. It’s dead simple: click on a friend’s name and he instantly receives a notification saying “Hey” from you. Hey. That’s all.

Trapcrunch even incorporates the same green and white colors and layout as us. Just look at the “T” and “C” in the TrapCrunch logo. It’s practically the same but with the colors reversed..

TechCrunch is pretty much synonymous with what people think of Silicon Valley and tech blogging. Even HBO’s Silicon Valley refers to us throughout the show. Producers replicated an entire conference in studio that made plenty of folks wonder if they’d actually filmed the show at Disrupt:hbo-silicon-valley-techcrunch-disrupt_large

This is not the first time we’ve seen copy cats to our site, of course. Some of you may recall a mirror spoof that fooled a lot of people into thinking Andreesen Horowitz bought Y Combinator a few months back.

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We also have a TechCrunch Onion parody on Twitter.

However, TrapCrunch is the most elaborate form of imitation we’ve seen so far. Personally, I have to applaud their effort. Satire is not as easy as it seems and there are plenty of failed Onion-like imitations out there to prove it.

We could take this imitation as a blatant dig on what we do here. But you know what “they” say – imitation is the sincerest form of flattery you can get.