TechCrunch acquires Fucked Company

The Ying and Yang of the startup business.

Michael Arrington has announced that TechCrunch has acquired famed Web 1.0 failures site Fucked Company in a script for assets deal.

Arrington says on the deal:

Since FC focuses on the negative news coming out of startups, and TechCrunch tends to focus on the positive, this combination may seem odd. But the sites are in fact extremely complementary. For example, the audiences are about equal in size and have very little overlap. So from day one we will double our reach and traffic.

To be honest I wouldn’t have visited Fucked Company in maybe 4-5 years, and am surprised it was even still going, and yet Arrington getting into the dead pool game is a sure sign that the boom is on the way out and that TechCrunch is going to have less and less positive start up stories to blog about….indeed remember 31 March, it could become one of those tipping point days in the history of Web 2.0, where the lead cheerleader for Web 2.0 went negative by acquisition.

Update: suggestions elsewhere + in the comments here that this is a April Fools Day joke from Arrington. Dave Winer seems to think it is, but the post is dated 31 March, not April 1, and as far as I can remember, jokes on March 31 don’t count as April fools day jokes. If it is a joke, Phillip Kaplan is in on it given the intro splash page at Fucked Company has a “big news” intro and a TechCrunch style logo for the site. Time will tell I guess, but oddly enough I still think the acquisition makes a lot of sense, even if it is a big joke.