Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel talks about Facebook rejecting a $1 billion offer from Yahoo in 2006. He and Accel’s Jim Breyer were on the same page – “take the money and run.”

But Zuckerberg said no. He “barely humored the idea of selling,” says Thiel. Which is about the same thing we heard back then: “At one point in the Yahoo negotiations, the talks extended into the weekend, says a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Zuckerberg, this account continues, said he couldn’t take part because his girlfriend was in town. Others pointed out they were closing in on a billion-dollar deal. Mr. Zuckerberg said it didn’t matter: his cellphone would be off.”

Even better was the way Zuckerberg handled the simultaneous negotiations with Microsoft: “During one series of talks with Microsoft, Facebook executives told their Microsoft peers they couldn’t do an 8 a.m. conference call because the company’s 22-year-old founder and chief executive, Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, wouldn’t be awake.”

Obviously Zuckerberg made the right decision. But what I’d love to know is what would have happened if Yahoo was able to make their top offer – some $1.62 billion.

Late in 2006 I obtained the internal Yahoo presentation analyzing a possible Facebook acquisition. Based on projected growth in Facebook users, Yahoo was willing to at least 60% more than the $1 billion they formally offered.

What if Zuckerberg had been willing to work that weekend, and Yahoo got in a new offer closer to what they were actually prepared to pay? Perhaps Zuckerberg would have said yes. Perhaps Thiel and Breyer would have threatened to murder him if he still didn’t budge.

We’ll never know for sure, of course, but I’m guessing Facebook would have said yes. Given Yahoo’s track record back then, though, it still wouldn’t have been a good deal for them. More likely than not, they would have destroyed Facebook, and would be moaning today about how much they overpaid.

Facebook is showing your content to far fewer people than they used to, says Nick Bilton at the NY Times, pointing out that while his subscribers have soared, the number of likes per post has declined rapidly. Josh Constine writes his thoughts here.

Bilton’s theory is that Facebook wants to incentivize people to pay to promote their content, so they show unpaid content to far fewer people. Hunter Walk has other theories (and correctly points out that comparing old data to new could be explained in other ways, as well).

Occam’s razor suggests Bilton is right, simply because Facebook has the incentive to make the free views scarce in order to increase demand for the paid views. But I just don’t know. As an aside, when I promoted a post back in November, Facebook told me I “had 969x as many views because you promoted it.”

Here’s what I do know – if you really care about Facebook likes, don’t just post your stuff to Twitter and then rely on it being republished automatically to Facebook. In my sample size of one, Facebook penalizes you significantly for that and shows that content to far fewer people.

I have Twitter auto post to my Facebook page, and I occasionally post things directly to Facebook as well. I’ve always noticed that the direct-to-Facebook approach generates far more likes, but I’ve never actually gone back and run the averages. Today I did, although only for the last few weeks of posts.

Here’s what I found. The average post published to Facebook by Twitter gets 13.6 likes. The average direct to Facebook post gets 81.1 likes.

I don’t care enough to change the way I publish to social networks. But you might.

Disclosure: I am a partner at CrunchFund, a venture firm. I and CrunchFund each own shares in Facebook. CrunchFund owns Twitter shares. More information is here.

Anyone wanting to see the whole “history is written by the victors” thing in process should read Tim Wu and John Gruber battle it out over exactly why Apple has kicked the crap out of everyone else since the late 90s.

Wu, who’s confused about what open v. closed systems really mean (he uses a variety of definitions), says that Apple has succeeded despite being a closed system. Gruber says open v. closed doesn’t matter, and says Apple succeeds because it produces great products fast (meaning first to market). Gruber’s argument can be condensed down to “Companies run by geniuses should generally do better than those which are not,” and I agree.

Except.

The Internet.

So When Gruber says “The Wintel duopoly certainly ate the Mac’s lunch in the ’90s, but this coincided with the nadir of the Mac’s qualitative superiority,” he’s right. But it’s more right to say “this coincided with the end of the pre-Internet world.”

Talking about Apple v. Microsoft without mentioning the Internet and the browser is like talking about WWII without talking about the nuke. Framing the conversation just in terms of open v. closed operating systems, the quality of the hardware or software or who the CEO was, is silly.

Because without the Internet happening there’s no way Apple would have succeeded.

Before the Internet all most people cared about was Office. And Office was really the only reason anyone wanted Windows machines instead of Macs.

I remember endless Apple v. Windows debates in the early 90s when I was in college. Macs were better machines, everyone said, the whole Office thing was a huge pain. It was difficult to transfer files between operating systems, and generally speaking if you wanted to do Office stuff you needed a Windows machine. Macs were for college kids doing graphics stuff. Windows machines were for grown ups.

That all changed in the mid 90′s of course. But before people bought computers primarily to get on the Internet Apple was hurting badly. Market share was so bad there was even a question about whether Microsoft would even continue making Office for Mac.

Then everything came together for Apple at roughly the same time. Steve Jobs came back in 1997. He got Microsoft to recommit to Office on the Mac. From Wikipedia:

At the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into a partnership with Microsoft. Included in this was a five-year commitment from Microsoft to release Microsoft Office for Macintosh as well as a US$150 million investment in Apple. As part of the deal Apple and Microsoft agreed to settle a long-standing dispute over whether Microsoft’s Windows operating system infringed on any of Apple’s patents.[47] It was also announced that Internet Explorer would be shipped as the default browser on the Macintosh. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates appeared at the expo on-screen, further explaining Microsoft’s plans for the software they were developing for Mac, and stating that he was very excited to be helping Apple return to success. After this, Steve Jobs said this to the audience at the expo:

“If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that’s great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody else’s fault, it’s our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software. So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy, this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry and to get healthy and prosper again.”

But more important than any of this, was the Internet. Back then Office was the first software I’d install on a computer, and a computer without Office wasn’t fully a computer. I haven’t even bothered to install Office on my last two computers at all.

So as important as Office was in 1997, what really changed the game for Apple was the Internet. Accessed via the most important virtual machine/operating system in our lifetimes, the browser, it completely leveled the playing field.

Suddenly computers weren’t entirely about Office, they were now about Office and the Internet. Mac had only a slightly hobbled version of Office, and they had a peachy Internet experience. As the Internet matured and browsers became better the “problems” lessened significantly. A half decade ago Office became unimportant enough, and compatibility was good enough between Mac and Windows, that it became a non issue entirely.

The rise of the Internet and the fall of Office is why Apple won. Or rather it gave them the opportunity to compete on a level playing field, and all the wonderful things about Apple were able to finally influence people into actually buying them. The world went from “I’d much rather have a Mac, but Office is too important” to “I’d much rather have a Mac but the damned things are too expensive.”

Post-Office but pre-Internet Apple struggled. Post-Internet, Apple won (because the playing field leveled and then, but only then, all the things Gruber says). It’s so obvious everyone forgets.

Editor’s note: The interview between Hunter Walk and Jason Kincaid reprinted below originally appeared on LinkedIn. Follow Hunter on LinkedIn. 

I was happily surprised to see Hunter Walk interview Jason Kincaid, one of the first TechCrunch employees. The interview is here and I’m reprinting it below.

Jason joined TechCrunch when it was still being run out of my house (before the city of Atherton kicked us out). Even after “retiring” he’s still no. 11 on the all time tech writers list.

Jason broke a lot of big stories. But he also has the rare ability to write thought pieces that shape Silicon Valley culture and thinking. From the moment he joined he was part of the core backbone of TechCrunch. From the article I wrote when he resigned in 2012:

Jason has the rare ability in a writer to both break big stories on his own, as well as write strong opinion articles on the topics of the day. Younger writers (who were often older than him) looked to him for leadership and guidance. He could have quite easily run TechCrunch entirely after we left.

Jason also became, as he says in the interview, a counter voice to many of the editorial and other decisions we made internally. Jason is not the kind of person who would just go with the flow. If he disagreed with something he’d immediately speak up. We often changed plans based on his input.

Anyway, this interview is interesting because it talks about some of the things that happened early on, things that became part of the mythology of TechCrunch. It was great to see this.

Early Employees: Jason Kincaid & the Rise of TechCrunch

Jason Kincaid, early TechCrunch reporter (@jasonkincaid)

Q: When did you join TechCrunch and how did you originally get connected to the team?

A: I usually tell a sanitized version of this story, but what the hell.

It was March 2008, and I’d just graduated from UCLA with a B.S. in biology, a minor in ‘society and genetics’, and zero sense as to what I wanted to do with my life. My good friend Ed McManus (now cofounder of Yardsale) invited me to a party being thrown by an investor in honor of Scribd’s (the ‘YouTube for documents’) first birthday.

The party was unlike anything college had prepared me for — and the likes of which I haven’t seen since. Caviar and vodka shots. Sculptures made of seafood. A basement that had been overhauled to resemble a vintage gas station. Waiters who walked around with endless glasses of champagne, deftly swooping in as soon as one hit empty. I’d had a few — and sure, I sampled the vodka — but the single stair, running the full length between the living room and a hallway, really should not have been there. It was too easy to forget about. I’d have remembered if there were, say, *two* stairs. But the one slipped my mind.

I tripped. My champagne glass fell, and the explosion — louder than any that had come before it — echoed through the halls. I bolted. Down the hallway, straight out the front door. I don’t even remember running, honestly. I stood there in the driveway, trying to catch my breath and staring at the mob of catering trucks, with a vague sense that I was now a Silicon Valley pariah — which I could handle — and that Eddie was going to kill me, which I felt badly about.

A few minutes passed and I reentered the house as stealthily as I could. No trace of the glass. Nobody was waiting to dole out further humiliation My heartbeat was still pounding in my ears. I sat on a couch in the now-deserted living room and considered how post-college life had really gotten off on the wrong foot.

Eventually a friendly guy I didn’t know named Mark Hendrickson came over and we started talking. He was a writer at TechCrunch, which I read sometimes, and I was waiting to hear back from The Economist about an internship I’d just interviewed for. He said to ping him if that fell through.

Two weeks later (“Bad news I’m afraid. You haven’t got it.”) I shot Mark an email. I had an interview with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and CEO Heather Harde that afternoon (my writing sample was my Letter of Introduction made out to The Economist). They said they’d try me out for a month and see how things went. As I left Mike told me to make myself irreplaceable. I sure tried.

Q: What phase was TC in at the time – still at Mike’s house? Who had been hired already?

A: TechCrunch was already a major force in the Valley, but we were still in Mike’s rented house in Atherton and very much a startup ourselves. On any given day there were four to eight of us, plus or minus some interns. Our desks took up the living room (which contained Heather’s pseudo-office), the foyer, the hallways, and two bedrooms. The only space Mike kept for his own was the master bedroom.

My desk was just outside Mike’s bedroom door, which meant I was the first person he saw some mornings. He’d open the door, stand in the doorway — groggily rubbing his tired eyes — and I’d already be halfway through telling him about another embargo train-wreck. Sometimes he’d walk straight back into his bedroom and slam the door. I couldn’t blame him. I don’t know how he did it for so long — I’d have gone bonkers.

I remember being excited that my checks said I was employee 0007 (MI6 has yet to call). I was less excited that my desk was near the ‘office’ bathroom.

The employees when I first joined: Michael Arrington (founder/editor), Heather Harde (CEO), Erick Schonfeld (co-editor, working from NYC), Mark Hendrickson (writer/developer), Henry Work (developer), Gene Teare (CrunchBase PM). I had a brief overlap with Mark McGranahan (developer), Sarah Ross (marketing), and Duncan Riley (writer); writer Nick Gonzalez left just before I started. There were a few folks working remotely on TC’s sister sites, including John Biggs (CrunchGear), Mike Butcher (TC UK), and Ouriel Ohayon (TC France).

Q: At what point did you realize the impact TC was having on the tech community?

A: It was a gradual process. First came the superficial, ‘Wow, TechCrunch is a big deal’ moments. Shortly after joining I wrote what would be the first of many posts criticizing Facebook for a privacy issue — in this case, there was a notification box with some misleading wording. Facebook changed it a few days later.

I felt like a badass (my bar was pretty low). Then I published my amateurish follow-up post, which featured the most mundane headline to ever appear on TechCrunch: Facebook Rewords Mini-Feed Notification. The commenters dutifully tore me apart and my ego has yet to recover.

It wasn’t until months later, after meeting with dozens of entrepreneurs, that I better understood TechCrunch’s real impact. There are plenty of people who see TechCrunch as just another big press outlet, but there’s also a mystique to it. The founders I spoke to expressed it in different ways — some got nervous, others overly-animated, still others had an anxious pleading — but you could sense that their interest in appearing on TechCrunch wasn’t just about getting good press. It was about validation, it was part of the journey; in many cases, it helped inspire them to start a company in the first place. This is still true for many founders. I tried not to forget that.

Q: What was your most meaningful contribution(s) to TC’s success?

A: There were some big stories — Apple’s blocking of Google Voice comes to mind, as does Facebook Fax (Facebook punked us by enabling a bizarre fax-this-photo feature just for TechCrunch employees. The following day I made my debut in the San Francisco Chronicle as the reporter who had covered a Facebook feature that “Doesn’t Exactly Exist”).

But I’d like to think my most meaningful contribution was my approach to writing, which I believe rubbed off on some of my colleagues. TechCrunch had several strong voices, some of which dabbled in hyperbole from time to time. I’m guilty of some sensational stories myself, but in general I tried to take a more cautious and nuanced approach, and I think it helped balance things out.

I’m also pretty opinionated (fancy that, a tech blogger with opinions!) and wasn’t afraid of letting Mike and Heather know when I was concerned about something — they always took the time to hear me out, which I appreciated. As a result, I helped with various decisions over the years.

Q: Did you have any traditions or rituals that helped define TC’s culture?

A: TechCrunch wasn’t big on traditions (the only one I can remember was Heather’s tradition of buying us cakes on our birthdays) but it’s possible the company culture wasn’t conducive to them. We had so much going on all the time — from surprise guests, to weird stuff arriving in the mail, to Mike needing us to send him an article to verify a fact minutes before he was going to be on TV — that the culture was more concerned with holding on for the ride than it was with establishing traditions. We ate a lot of Chipotle and enjoyed playing with Mike’s dogs, but I’m not sure those qualify.

For several years running I did try to make wearing a suit to the Crunchies a company-wide tradition (I like wearing suits), but didn’t have many takers.

Q: How did you find out that TC has been sold to AOL and what were your feelings?

A: The day is a blur. Om Malik broke the news in the middle of TechCrunch Disrupt, which is a frantic time for the writing staff. I remember sitting next to a few colleagues and re-reading that post about ten times. I had friends sending me lame jokes about AOL CDs before I knew what was going on. We got most of the details at an all-hands that evening.

There was a part of me that was happy — I’d soon be getting a check that would make nearly any 25-year-old thrilled. But there was also a tinge of disappointment. I’d long thought that TechCrunch had gotten the ‘hard stuff’ right — Mike, Heather, and Erick had built up a great writing team and somehow managed to get these strong personalities to work together as a happy-ish family. But the product side was problematic: we never had enough developers, and the ones we had were constantly putting out fires and couldn’t dedicate much time to actually improving the site. I thought there was a lot of upside to be had if we could get TechCrunch’s user experience to live up to (and maybe even enhance) its content.

That said, I don’t hold anything against Mike for selling. TechCrunch was his baby and he put everything he had into it, to the point that I grew seriously concerned about his health at times. The landscape for tech blogs and other ‘new media’ is tumultuous and unpredictable — if selling seemed like the right call at the time, I can’t blame him.

Q: Today tech journalism is big business and there are multiple sites fighting for readers. Do you think TC is still the most influential – why or why not?

A: The short version: yes, TechCrunch is still the most influential, though the competition is fierce.

When I first started at TechCrunch it was relatively unknown outside of tech circles — I told people I worked at “a tech news site”. These days, some people get mildly offended if I ask them if they’ve heard of it (“Uh… yeah, of course”). Hell, they’re running ads in NYC taxi cabs. So, in that regard it’s clearly grown in influence.

AOL’s foolish decision to force Mike out, followed by the loss of some great people, obviously left a mark that has taken time to recover from. Mike (and the rest of us — but usually Mike) broke really big stories regularly. That’s hard to replace. And it takes time to establish new voices.

But they’ve been working hard, and, while there’s plenty left to do — it’s paying off. Startups still go to great lengths to try to get on TechCrunch and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon. Of course, I’m a little biased — I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’ll see an ad for TechCrunch on a flight into space someday.

So I was chatting with my dad yesterday. We had a long drive home after the Department of Homeland Security seized and impounded my boat. The mood was somber.

We were talking about how awful America has become. We are a nation that has been split into groups that absolutely hate each other. Debt is rising, taxes are rising and freedom is being demolished. Meanwhile our elected officials are doing little more than stoking the drama fire while fiddling with the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Whatever your politics, you must see it too. Just pick a political story at random and read the comments. There is no logic or reason on either side, only hypocrisy and hate.

I’m a creature of startups. For example, I don’t want government interference in the startup ecosystem.

And more importantly, as someone immersed in startup culture, I am a big fan of just walking away from stuff that can’t be fixed. In my post “Always Swim Downstream” I talk about focusing on what you’re good at and just walking away from unsolvable problems.

America is an unsolvable problem, a nation divided and deeply in hate with itself. If it was a startup we’d understand how unfixable the situation is, most of us would leave for a fresh start and the company would fall apart.

America is MySpace.

But leaving America means renouncing your citizenship, moving out of the country and leaving family and friends behind. You can retain your citizenship if you like, but you’ll still be away from loved ones and still be paying taxes. You lose all the good stuff about America and have to keep all the bad stuff.

I love this country but we have a management team that’s both evil and incompetent. And the way “stockholder rights” are implemented there’s absolutely no way to stop or even slow down the rush to misery. I wish people had the choice of voting with their feet. This tends to keep the individual states somewhat honest in their dealings with citizens because they have to compete against 49 other states. But there’s no escaping the fed. It’s like a startup where everyone is miserable but no one is allowed to quit.

Yesterday I wrote about the ongoing CNET editorial independence issue. I said that the editors and journalists at CNET were part of the problem, and suggested that they either publish their (assumed) dissent, or resign, or both.

A conversation began in the comments of that post, with some people saying that it isn’t reasonable to expect people to resign.

From Danny Sullivan:

I think a lot of CNET staffers probably aren’t resigning, Mike, because they have families to support, as well as themselves. It’s not exactly a great economy out there. I think what Greg did was very brave, but not everyone is that brave nor even able to make that type of move.

Rof Hof:

I don’t blame people in today’s publishing business for wanting to line up work first. Not everybody can be sure of being able to support their families, and when they’ve been screwed by their employer, they shouldn’t be expected to *immediately* screw themselves too. But don’t be surprised to see more leaving.

There were similar comments on Twitter. These comments were often combined with statements my position wasn’t valid because I have made some money selling my business.

As just one example, David Carnoy, Executive Editor at CNET, says:

@arrington In your post about @CNET you neglected to disclose $$$ you made from selling out to AOL. Easy to walk when you had your BIG EXIT.

And finally, some people have said that it’s only reasonable for people to resign if they have another job lined up.

Hunter Walk, in a comment to the original post, says:

Let’s see other journalists stand with their brethren and start a “free the CNET staffers” fund that can be tapped by any CNET journalist who wants to walk away but needs the money to do so. Mike, I’ll match up to the first $500 of your contribution

I think some of these are valid points and worth exploring.

First, sure it’s easy for me to say they should just quit their jobs when I’m not the one doing it and I may have more financial security than most or all of them. If I worked at CNET, had a family to take care of and had little financial breathing room I cannot say for certain that I’d resign. My family would certainly come first (and second, and third). It’s a fair point.

Second, I agree that it would certainly be easier for CNET people to resign if they knew that they had another job waiting for them.

Still, I think there are some profound issues to think through that drive to the core of what it means to be a journalist, and these issues are worth exploring.

What does it mean to be a journalist? If I have bias here, it isn’t in net worth. It’s that I don’t respect what I’ve called the Priesthood of Journalism. Journalists hold themselves apart, and above, the common person. They have rules designed to ensure their objectivity and impartiality.

Among those rules – “Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.”

It doesn’t say “unless you report to them,” or “unless you might lose your job.”

No, journalists hold themselves to a higher standard. Situations like CNET are exactly what journalists are supposed to fight. That’s why we entrust them as the fourth estate.

Is the pushback here because we’re just talking about tech press and not real press? What if someone at the New York Times was under express orders not to write about a political or financial scandal? Would we say it’s ok if they were at risk of losing their job and maybe not being able to pay their mortgage? Hell no, we’d consider that reporter as part of the overall conspiracy. “Just following orders” doesn’t cut it there, and the tech press should hold themselves to those same standards.

Journalists are supposed to put the people first, even before themselves. Around the world and throughout history journalists have died to get the truth out. We’re not talking about losing a job and having trouble paying the bills. We’re talking about things like having your head removed from your body.

Of course covering the latest tech gadgets isn’t quite the same thing as covering a bloody civil war. It’s not as important, or dangerous. But there is still quite clearly a principle at stake here. If a tech journalist needs financial security before doing what their conscience dictates, I’m not sure they should be calling themselves journalists at all.

Would it be ok for a CNET reporter to take a bribe to cover or not cover a certain product? Or what if CBS said “in appreciation of you not leaving after this debacle we want to give you all a 10% spot bonus.” Would that be ok? But what if they really need that bribe or spot bonus? What if they have a sick kid and can’t pay the hospital bills? Is it ok then?

To me, every paycheck a CNET reporter receives from here on out is just a bribe. A bribe that they are accepting in exchange for putting up with CBS telling them what they can and cannot say. By staying they are making it easier for companies to do evil in the future.

“It comes down to *why* we do this job. Do we have a burning passion to report the truth, or simply a desire to eat?” – Lee Hutchinson

So to end this I’ll say this. I don’t think CNET reporters are bad people for not quitting, and I quite understand that some of them may not be in any kind of financial position to even consider it. But as this crisis passes, perhaps those that couldn’t make that hard decision should consider if, over the long run, they should continue to call themselves journalists. Perhaps a new line of work, one where the public isn’t relying on them, is a better choice.

A couple of weeks ago CNET was put into an absurd situation – they could not favorably cover a technology product because the company behind that product was in litigation with CNET’s parent company, CBS.

I wasn’t all that interested in the story at the time. Reporters and bloggers are constantly pressured to write or not write about things by parent companies and even business executives in their own companies. CBS telling CNET what it could and could not write about wasn’t anything I haven’t seen before.

I understand why CBS was trying to control messaging about a company that they were suing, although they certainly weren’t very smart about how they handled it. The Streisand Effect kicked in and not only did the product end up getting tons of extra positive press, but both CBS and CNET looked like idiots.

Still, big companies do stupid things all the time. It’s a big part of why small startups are often so successful at disrupting them.

What I don’t get is why CNET staffers have stuck around. They’re the ones who are supposed to be journalists and all that entails. They’re the ones I blame right now.

I blame them because they’re the only reason CBS is able to get away with this. Every single journalist at CNET should have resigned by now.

More than once at TechCrunch we made AOL extremely uncomfortable with things that we wrote. But they never ordered us to write or not write about something because they understood that not only would we not comply, we’d write a post about the whole thing.

Our independence from AOL was so important to me that I negotiated an extremely odd provision in our purchase agreement that allowed me to disclose confidential information about AOL. It was their job never to give me that information. It was not my job to protect it in any way.

If AOL had ever ordered me to remove a piece of content from the site for any reason I would have immediately written about it and disclosed the situation to our readers. And if I had ever ordered a writer to remove content I would have expected that writer to have done the same to me.

In fact, one of the things I am most proud about at TechCrunch is the culture of independence in its writers. Many times I have been criticized publicly by my own team. We’ve even had absurd arguments break out, on the site, about the pros and cons of one gadget over another. It can drive readers crazy to see all the conflict, but there was never any question about whether or not people’s unfettered opinions were being expressed.

When Greg Sandoval left CNET (to my knowledge the only person who’s resigned over this mess) I thought he’d be the first of many. His words – “We are supposed to be truth tellers” – rang true.

Why haven’t others followed him? Why are they still grumbling about it on TV but not actually doing anything about it?

CNET reporters need to either be resigning or be reporting this story, or both. On CNET. If someone higher up removes their content then they should republish it on their personal blogs. If they are then fired for that they should sue the company. And either way, other tech sites, including this one, would be more than happy to make them job offers.

I left (or was fired) TechCrunch in 2011 over editorial independence. The Huffington Post tried (and was successful for a time) to take control of TechCrunch. And not only did I leave, a whole string of writers and editors left shortly afterwards. It wasn’t until AOL removed TechCrunch from the control of the Huffington Post that things stabilized. And today TechCrunch is stronger than it ever was, by far.

And, importantly, even when all of this was going on at TechCrunch, AOL and Huffington Post never successfully tried to censor TechCrunch writers from saying exactly what they thought. Things got messy, but they were never hidden.

Earlier today I read John Gruber’s short post about what’s happening at CNET. He wrote that the situation was untenable, and “CBS either needs to give CNet editorial independence or sell them to someone who will. As it stands, they’re grinding CNet’s reputation and brand into worthless powder.”

Those are almost the exact words I yelled shortly before I left TechCrunch – either sell the site back to the original shareholders or give us true editorial independence.

As with AOL and TechCrunch, it’s unlikely that CBS will do either. But at the very least, it might make CBS think twice if CNET’s editorial and reporter teams were to simply say exactly what they think, and then walk out.

In short I expect big companies to be some combination of stupid and evil. But when the people affected do absolutely nothing, they’re just part of the problem, too.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”

Update: See Truth, Money, Right, Wrong

Last Sep Aaron asked for help in his defense, read the reactions then and compare to now: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529484

—
nik cubrilovic (@nikcub) January 14, 2013

Nik Cubrilovic points out that people were significantly less enraged by Aaron’s legal troubles just a few months ago.

Apparently Swartz wasn’t able to make a direct plea for help:

For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge.

That’s probably why the request for funds didn’t include much information. One thing I know from personal experience, judges hate it when parties talk publicly about their cases. There are a lot of things about our criminal legal system that need to be changed, and this is just one of them. Prosecutors know how to play the press. Most defendants don’t.

But regardless, some people have done a complete 180 degree turn. “edw519” for example commented on the first article (this comment was upvoted to the top spot):

Now let me see if I got this right:
1. Brilliant programmer gets chance of a lifetime.
2. Turns that into lots of money early in life.
3. Decides to change the world in his own way.
4. Consciously & purposefully breaks the law.
5. Has a webpage to get others to pay his legal bills.
I’ve never met Aaron but I’ve always enjoyed his writing and looked forward to meeting him one day. But there is something seriously wrong about this.
Aaron should man up, take responsibility for his actions, and pay his own bills.
And if this is his idea of changing the world, perhaps he should reconsider his choices and find a better way of paying it forward to other brilliant programmers who never got the breaks he did.

Compare to more recent comments:

edw519 2 days ago | link | parent | on: Cory Doctorow: RIP, Aaron Swartz

Thank you, Cory. This wonderful post will bring understanding (and maybe even comfort) to many of us who are sad and confused today.
It will also probably save some lives.
reply

edw519 2 days ago | link | parent | on: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

OH NO!
Stunned & heartbroken.

In 2008 I was griping about 2,433 unread emails in my inbox. Which is nothing. Today it’s up around 7,000, and I declared an email bankruptcy just a few months ago and started fresh.

Cue, a handy mobile app for organizing and searching your online data across a variety of services, released some fascinating anonymized user data this afternoon that confirms what we all know already. We’re getting a lot more emails and reading fewer and fewer of them.

The service lets users auth in to things like email, cloud storage, calendaring, etc., to deal with them all in one place. It gives them an unprecedented amount of data about users’ online activities.

Here’s what the aggregate data from a random selection of Cue users tells us about email habits:

- Average number of email words written per person in 2012: 41,368 (about the size of the Lord of the Flies novel)
- Average messages received in 2012: 5,579
- Average messages sent in 2012: 869

CEO Daniel Gross also tells me (not included on the chart) that users are becoming much slower in responding to emails. The average response time in 2012 was 2.5 days. In 2011 it was 2.2 days, nearly a 14% increase in response time. And if you don’t get a response within 24 hours you may have to wait a while. If a message gets a response there’s a 56% chance it’ll come within an hour, and a whopping 89% likelihood it will come within 24 hours. To get the average out to 2.5 days, the remaining responses come much, much later.

Tuesday is the busiest email day, although Wednesday is the most popular day for calendaring meetings. 11 am is the busiest email time of day.

There’s fun data included as well. accounts for over 50% of emoticon usage. only gets 4.89%. My personal favorite rings in at just 0.21%.

If a presidential nominee was mentioned last year in an email, it was “Obama” 68% of the time. Romney got just 32% of mentions. Dogs were the most popular animal at 38%, cats got just 32%. And if you click on the most common swearwords, you’ll see which one is most popular.

See all the data here.

I love talking about taxes.

Our President and both houses of Congress have finally all agreed on a deal on this whole fiscal cliff mess. I’ve been holding my breath on this because I thought for sure that I’d be paying a lot more in taxes this year. But I dodged the bullet.

All venture capitalists did, actually.

Nothing the government agreed to in the last few days actually affects the asset wealthy in this country. If you’re a Hollywood agent barely getting by with a million dollar a year salary and two ex spouses, your life sucks right now. You’re going to have barely any money left over at the end of each month for cocaine with the tax increase. Small business owners will also take a hit because their business profits are considered income in most cases.

Luckily I’m not in any of the groups who are being affected much. I have some money in the bank from selling TechCrunch a couple of years ago, which of course isn’t taxed on an ongoing basis. So I’m good there. And even better, there hasn’t been a word mentioned about the carried interest loophole.

Most of the money I make now comes from investments from CrunchFund. And the vast majority of that is what’s called carried interest. Even though I’m investing other people’s money, the government calls it a capital gain. So instead of paying 39.6 percent on that money (I won’t call it income), I pay only 15 percent (or maybe 20 percent under the new rules – it isn’t clear to me).

In other words, income is a sucker’s game. Carried interest rocks.

Everyone wants the rich to pay more in taxes. They’re thinking about Mitt Romney and Warren Buffett when they say “rich people.” But really rich people like that are totally protected. Their accumulated wealth can only be touched by inflation. And if they’re in the hedge fund game, most of their “income” is taxed at just 15 percent.

Which is why Warren Buffett can pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. And why, even after calling for tax increases for the rich, he’ll still be paying a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Kill This Loophole

Many of us benefiting from it have been asking for it to end for years because it is so vastly unfair.

It’s not often that something is so egregious that even the people benefiting from it are asking for it to go away.

Why hasn’t it been closed? There are two reasons, I think. The first: intense lobbying efforts from the super rich keep crushing any moves to end the carried interest loophole in Congress. Democrats and Republicans like the kind of money these people can donate to their campaigns. And second, it’s just so complicated to explain. Everyone understands how normal income works, and it’s super easy to say “tax the rich.” Explaining how the super rich don’t even really deal with income tax stuff is just too complicated.

So we end up with something that the super rich love – new taxes on other people.

The government gets to appease the masses by taxing high-income people a little more. And the people who are actually rich get to keep things the way the are. It also keeps those pesky upstarts with a lot of income but few assets from accumulating enough stuff to enter the super rich club.

The only problem is that all this tax theater isn’t going to do anything at all to address the massive deficit and debt problems we have. Just look at this chart. All that work and drama for just $60ish billion in annual revenue.

The middle class need to get ready for big tax increases in the near future. That’ll happen before spending cuts can be stomached by this country. And God help us if interest rates rise and the cost of debt financing increases.

We are so screwed. But for now, I’m totally good. Thanks, Congress!

It’s just about 2013 and I gotta say, I’m a little bored.

At least, the blogger in me is. As an investor things are just peachy. All this panic about overpriced consumer startups has led to a nice softening of the market (periodic reports of Blubbles are great for that). And other sectors, like business to business, is still under capitalized v. the consumer sector.

But as a consumer and observer of tech, things feel very 2002ish to me. There’s been a lot of belt tightening, for example, as many startups are trying to make their seed rounds stretch just a little bit longer.

But it’s more than that. I just don’t see the tons of crazy new ideas that I did a few years ago. Things that are genuinely new and interesting.

Yeah, yeah, mobile. I get it. Everything’s mobile these days. LET’S GO MO-BILE! But really that’s just an IQ test. When you see bold new startups with nothing but a desktop strategy, you know they just don’t get it and you move on.

But really a lot of the mobile stuff out there is just radioactive decay from the iPhone launching in 2007.

2007!

Old news! Ancient platforms!

Yeah, the iPhone and Android are great. But seriously, look at the top headline grabbers in tech news in 2012. Apple. Google. Facebook. Microsoft. Christ. It might as well still be 2007.

I don’t want to read any more stories about how Facebook cloned something they couldn’t buy. Or that Twitter banned something that they tried to buy but Facebook got there first. Or the press regurgitating how Google+ is somehow not flailing. Or about the number of Android v. iPhone devices. Or Samsung’s patent mishaps. Or how Yahoo is winding down things in Asia.

I certainly don’t want to, for example, spend another minute debating Hunter Walk on the nuances of social graphs or whether we should be given a way to efficiently remove friends from Facebook.

For two other examples look at the post directly below this one, and (in a few minutes) the one directly above. Snoozers!

I want something completely new and different to happen, and lots of it. Stuff that makes us change the way we think about a market, or the world. Something that inspires a new generation of crazy startups doing crazy things.

I don’t want to be completely negative on the tech world today. And I have seen some pretty amazing things over the last year that really are indistinguishable from magic. We’ve even invested in a few of them. But it’s very early days yet.

And we need more. Lots more. Paradigm shifting stuff that has almost zero chance of succeeding. Which is ok. Because whoever tries this stuff (and fails) will certainly land on their feet, and they’ll have great stories to tell their grandchildren.

If you want to build a startup that has a good chance of succeeding, don’t listen to me. Listen to Paul Graham and others who are applying tons of data to the idea of startup success. That will maximize your chance of being successful.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for flying boats. Or something to improve my memory. And the last great human invention, 100 percent realistic virtual reality via a brain-computer interface. Because once we plug into that, most of us will probably never unplug.

Which is fine. We’re probably all just living in a computer simulation anyway. We might as well have some fun while we’re at it.

We live in an age where we expect and experience exponential change in tech. Where common everyday items were just fantasies (or unimagined) decades ago. Let’s speed things up, people. I’m bored.

TechCrunch reader Kuan Yong sent me an email today showing me something that I thought I’d never see. I thought it must be some photoshopped joke. But I’ve confirmed it for myself. TechCrunch, it seems, has joined the Tapjoy app download circle jerk parade.

Paying for app installs is just embarrassing. To do it to manipulate app rankings is also a clear violation of Apple’s terms of service.

I’m so ashamed. This would have never happened in the old days.

Ron Conway, Silicon Valley’s best known angel investor, got quite a gift this evening. Laurene Jobs, the wife of the late Steve Jobs, dropped by the Conway annual holiday party this evening and unveiled what I can only describe as an epic painting of the man. It was hung on the wall, and just about everyone in attendance took a picture.

The painting is based on a photo taken of Ron and his dog Coco for a Fortune article earlier this year.

I tried to steal it because I thought the painting really should be up at the CrunchFund offices (as a conversation piece). Security suggested that was a bad idea.

The party was significantly less festive than previous years because of the horrendous shootings in Connecticut earlier today. Conway’s toast was mostly about the families affected. Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was at the party – Conway rightfully called her an American hero.

You can’t say I didn’t give it an honest try. It was over a year ago now that I tried switching from an Android phone to the iPhone. The main reason I had waited so long was my tether to Google Voice – I’m all in there after porting my phone number to them a few years ago. And Google Voice never worked natively on the iPhone.

Until Sprint, that is. Their partnership with Google let me use my Google Voice number as my Sprint iPhone number, bypassing Apple completely and letting me use Google Voice natively for SMS, phone log dialing, etc.

So I switched to Sprint and enabled Google Voice and I thought all my problems were fixed (putting aside Sprint’s awful signal and data issues). I even got one of those Sprint Airwave boxes to get a signal at home. I was committed to making this work.

It doesn’t work. It never really has. I give up now.

Phone Calls: If I initiate a call from Google Voice in the browser to my iPhone everything works great. If I initiate the call directly from the iPhone, then about half the time my caller id shows my Google Voice number, and half the time it shows the original Sprint number. It tends to do this in bunches, so as soon as I think it’s settled on one number or the other it switches on me again. People have no idea who’s calling them, and eventually they end up storing both my phone numbers and it’s a mess.

SMS: Same thing. If I text from the browser it’s all good. But when I use my phone it mostly uses the original Sprint phone number. Text messages sent to my Google Voice number sometimes, but don’t always, show up on my phone. Text messages from my phone only show up in Google Voice in the browser if the phone happened to use the Google Voice number that time.

A common (daily) sms exchange with me looks something like this:

You: Hey Mike
Me: Hey
You: Who is this?

That’s because they send a SMS to my GV number. It was forwarded to my phone (which sometimes happens, sometimes not). I respond but Sprint uses the old Sprint number, so it sets up a whole new thread on the other person’s phone. They have no idea who I am.

Then we have a whole discussion about it being me and how Google Voice is weird and oh yeah there went another five minutes of my life.

None of these issues are new, they’ve plagued the partnership since the beginning. I just kept hoping they’d fix it.

It’s clear they aren’t in any hurry to fix it, though, and I’m done. It’s time for me to cycle back to Android anyway to keep current on that platform.

So I’m unboxing that Nexus 4 that Google sent me last month and I’ll get Google Voice running natively on that in no time.

As for home service, by the way, that whole OBiTalk with Google Voice thing was a big bust, too. It worked except it didn’t ring. Meaning if I happened to pick up the phone when someone was calling I’d get a good connection. But that was a loser’s game and I kept missing calls at home. So I switched to Vonage.

We just got screwed. More on this below.

Nobody says “Web 2.0” anymore. The term just didn’t stand the test of time, long ago it became clichéd.

But a handful of years ago it had real meaning to a lot of us. It encompassed a lot of ideas, but chief among them was the notion of mashed up web services, all collaborating via APIs.

Whether a service had robust APIs to allow it to collide in unexpected ways with other services was very important. Services that left out APIs, for whatever reason, were flawed.

And, importantly, services at least paid lip service to the idea that data was “ours,” not “theirs,” and would be treated accordingly.

So that was a really nice fantasy that lasted for a long while. But what happens in the real world is companies grow up, hire grown ups and they sit in board meetings and they fret about barriers to entry in their respective markets.

And they forget about users.

They all do it. Facebook screwed us (disclosure, CrunchFund owns Facebook stock). Twitter screwed us repeatedly, and comes back regularly for more (see Dave Winer’s wild ramblings over the years that all seem to come true) (disclosure, CrunchFund owns Twitter stock).

And now Instagram (owned by Facebook, so see disclosure above) is screwing us.

Case in point, this piece of art that I created, called Poohead, will no longer display properly on Twitter. I have to live with a flawed reproduction of the original artwork, cropped incompetently and the magic is just lost.

Mostly people are saying it’s ok that Instagram is screwing us by removing our ability to properly share our pictures on Twitter. Because Twitter screwed Instagram multiple times in the recent past.

Twitter, of course, only screwed Instagram because Instagram screwed Twitter right before Twitter screwed them. Because Instagram decided that they’d rather be acquired by Facebook instead of Twitter.

Screw that, thought Twitter. We used to love Instagram, particularly during the time while we were trying to buy Instagram. But then we didn’t buy them and so, obviously, we now hate Instagram. We’re gonna screw them and bad.

So that’s all clear now.

But there are lots of civilian casualties in all this screwing. Those civilians being us users, the dopes that keep feeding these companies content in the vain hope that this time we won’t get screwed.

Because these companies we love do treat our data as sacred, right? They don’t sit around the office calling our data their data and occasionally slip up in public, too, right? Except,

“This is an evolution of just where we are and where we want links from our content to go.”

That was Instagram founder Kevin Systrom earlier today at the Le Web conference talking to my CrunchFund partner MG Siegler (disclosure, MG is my partner at CrunchFund).

Yep, Instagram is now officially in the “it’s our data” club. Pretty much everyone joins that club as soon as they can. One day they love users and talk about how much they owe their users. The next day it’s “users who? This is our data.”

And of course it goes without saying that the best way to run a business is to treat users with respect and make sure that your product does everything it can to delight and amaze. Except,

“This [screwing users, because Twitter screwed them before right after they screwed Twitter] is a consequence of us doing the best thing for our business at this time.”

Systrom again. Taking care of business by doing the opposite of delighting and amazing them.

Someday one of these companies is going to grow up from a fledgling, user-loving baby startup and get lots of traction and then…and then…wait…think hard…No! We will not screw over the users. Even though we totally have the moral high ground here because somebody else screwed somebody before and now it’s all just a blood feud that nobody can figure out who started and QUICK grab all that money over there before those other guys do.

See that? They thought about doing the right thing, which may have even gathered so much long-term user loyalty that they could be sitting on a hundred year brand. And in the middle of thinking all those noble thoughts about doing right by users they just slapped themselves back down to earth and did what they always do.

Seize all assets within reach, and tell the sheeple users that they were sadly forced to do this to protect the data, which is their data now, and PS thank you very much for transferring all that data you made to us. High five! Then go home and pour yourself a double Macallan, neat, and tell yourself again how much you are helping the world become a better place.

Disclosure – I just broke a rule where I said I wouldn’t be talking much here on TechCrunch about companies we’ve invested in at CrunchFund. In this post I have a financial interest in every single company mentioned, who are all acting like children all hopped up on sugar and playing with too many LEGOs.

LEGOs made of solid gold, lovingly crafted by us. The screwed sheeples. We sheeples get no LEGOs. None at all.

A TechCrunch tradition: wasting time in the office by putting ourselves and coworkers into JibJab videos (and then posting them). They just released a Gangnam Style one, starring you as Psy. Get to it.

The question isn’t really whether you’ll watch the amazing Gangnam Style video with MC Hammer from the American Music Awards last night. It’s how many times you’ll hit “replay.” I’ve now watched it half a dozen times.

How does something like this get organized? We’d imagine months of negotiations between lawyers and various rights holders ending in some sort of complicated contract. In reality, it all came together one evening at a late night revelry at Google Zeitgeist last month.

Scooter Braun, who’s PSY’s agent (as well as Justin Beibers’s), was apparently hanging out with super angel Ron Conway, MC Hammer and others at the Google event. Braun mentioned to Hammer that PSY was a huge fan of Hammer’s and had expressed an interest in bringing Hammer on stage at the AMA to perform with him.

Hammer agreed. Scooter then handed Hammer his cell phone, which was ringing to an outbound phone. PSY picked up and the details were arranged.

One month later, we get to see PSY in parachute pants dancing with Hammer on stage, including cuts to the audience where celebrities are doing the ridiculous Gangnam Style dance.

No one can ever take that away from us.

Livestar first launched at TechCrunch Disrupt a few months ago. It’s a mobile app that lets you see (and write) reviews for the things you generally want reviews for – restaurants, movies, music and other apps. The company was founded by former Microsoft M&A exec Fritz Lanman.

The reason you want Livestar on your phone and use it every day is it combines normal user reviews (like we’ve grown accustomed to on Yelp) with professional critics.

You don’t have to scour the Internet for those professional restaurant reviews. Use Livestar to pull up local restaurants and present those reviews for you. Same with music and movies. You can do it all with one app.

Livestar was pretty useful when it launched, but a lot of key features were left out. Those features are in there now.

There are now 200,000 professional critic reviews. 875,000 total reviews. And when you find what you want, Livestar helps you get it. Click to reserve a table at the restaurant with OpenTable. Or add songs to your Spotify and Rdio playlists. Get theater movie tickets from Fandango.

And best of all, add older movies directly to your Netflix queue.

All of these service integrations are new with the new version. And soon third-party developers will be able to access Livestar data for their own apps.

If you’re constantly opening Yelp, IMDB and other apps on your phone like I am, try this out. You may like it.

About That $30 Amazon Gift Card

You can also easily get a $30 Amazon Gift Card for trying out Livestar. If you can get at least 15 friends to accept invites and try the app, you’ll get the card.

Directly paying users to invite their friends is a time-honored way to (a) spend a lot of money fast, and (b) if the service is good, get very fast and sticky distribution. PayPal famously did this over a decade ago, paying users $10 for every new user they referred. Suddenly, every single person I knew in Silicon Valley was beaming money back and forth on their Palm Vs. Since PayPal was actually really useful, the crazy scheme worked.

Livestar is doing something similar, although a little less crazy. Instead of a flat cash payment they’re giving away Amazon gift cards. And instead of $10 per new user, it’s $2 per new user, with a $30 cap.

Why are they doing this?

“Buying downloads and getting to the iOS leaderboards costs around $10,000 a day on Tapjoy and other services,” Lanman told me. “It’s expensive, the users bail immediately and it’s slimy. What we’re doing is actually much cheaper and gets us better users.”

“How do your investors feel about this?” I asked.

“They say if it works they’re going to get their other portfolio companies to try it out, too.”

Disclosure: I have no direct or indirect financial interest in Livestar. See here for my full disclosure policy.

Dan Lyons has a post over on ReadWrite facilitating a classic Mark Cuban rant. Cuban is pissed about the Facebook Promote fees for the Dallas Mavericks Facebook page – he was asked for $3,000 to reach 1 million people who’ve already Liked the page.

As an aside, I checked the promote fees on my own FB account. It’s a flat $50 and I have 350,000 subscribers. I promoted a test post – I like how it shows me how many paid (100%) v. unpaid (0%) views I have so far. Since Facebook is in control of both types of views it isn’t all that meaningful. Still, I wouldn’t feel like such a chump if I saw at least a few unpaid views. Cuban’s right, this has the appearance of shady.

Anywho, the part of the article that caught my eye was when Cuban told Lyons that he’s never bought Facebook stock. He says:

I Wouldn’t Buy Facebook Stock

“I haven’t bought and I wouldn’t buy here. I think they have to determine what their business is right now and how they will make money at it. I don’t believe they are clear about either.”

Which is weird because Cuban wrote about how he bought Facebook stock earlier this year after the IPO. Specifically he says “I bought and sold FB shares.”

What I’m wondering is if Lyons got the quote wrong. Cuban doesn’t actually say he wouldn’t buy Facebook stock, he just says “I haven’t bought and…” and Lyons put that bold header on top of the quote saying “I Wouldn’t Buy Facebook Stock.” Maybe Cuban was saying he hasn’t bought a promoted post.

Sloppy.

Disclosure: I personally own Facebook stock, and CrunchFund has shares in Facebook. See my full disclosure schedule here.

Update: Cuban clarifies in the comments below: “actually, it was in reference that I haven’t bought since my one round trip trade and I don’t currently own it.”

Memories of Scamville have faded, and we don’t see the brazen customer ripoff schemes from the big gaming companies these days.

But the main company behind Scamville, Offerpal (the company renamed as Tapjoy after the Scamville disaster), just can’t seem to find an honest way to make a buck. In their new incarnation Tapjoy is the primary purveyor of paid app downloads, and it has made a mess of the mobile app ecosystem.

Here’s how it works. You use a mobile app and want virtual currency to do things (usually a game). In the old Scamville you’d get signed up for a recurring mobile phone charge or some other nonsense. Today you just get offered currency to download other apps.

Sometimes those apps are free and sometimes they aren’t. Uniformly, they suck. But Tapjoy gets paid for the download and they pass on some of it to the first app. The app developer buying these downloads gets a massive spike in activity, driving it up the leaderboards. Which means more downloads.

Within a few days Apple catches on and removes the app. But then the devlopers just create a new junk app and the whole system starts again.

Apple has waged war on incentivized app downloads for a long while now. See this post from 2011, for example, when Apple started rejecting apps that included these offers.

Tapjoy and others evolved, simply moving the offers to HTML pages opened with a browser, something Apple can’t review during the approval process (because it isn’t turned on yet). The offers remained; the only real difference was Apple didn’t even get their 30 percent cut any longer.

Apple is coming down hard on apps that use HTML pages to push offers, too. It’s not clear how they’re doing it, but it’s clearly having an effect.

Example – Glu Mobile, a public company, gets 13 percent of their overall revenue from Tapjoy. In an earnings call this week CEO Niccolo de Masi had some bad news to report:

We have also recently experienced degradation and iOS advertising revenues as Apple has extended it prohibition of incentivize advertising to include any linkage to external HTML 5 sites.

This reduces revenue from the Tapjoy iOS channel. As a result our expectation for Q4 are being substantially lowered to reflect these factors as well as to delay our five new titles while our President of Studios completes its 60-day review.

I can’t wait to see what Tapjoy does next in this ever-escalating arms race. One thing’s for sure – it’ll be very profitable. And very shady.