Mike Arrington today announced that TechCrunch has acquired InviteShare, a service where users can share invitations to invite-only sites. This is, as far as I know, TechCrunch’s first acqusition and probably a harbinger of things to come.
About a month ago we had the idea of creating a fairly simple website that could match users who have invites to those that want them. We started building it but before we were ready to launch an identical service, InviteShare, came on the scene (created by Jeff Broderick at EkinDesigns). I liked it, and I wrote about it last week. The site now has about 14,000 registered users and 15,000 invites have been sent out.
Judging from the bidding history on SitePoint, it seems they paid $25.000 for the site. Also according to the auction, the service is currently making $6 a day - that’s almost a fancy drink at Starbucks a day, brought to TechCrunch by the 14.000 users of the site.
Now that doesn’t seem like a very profitable business to be in, but it is a perfect fit for TechCrunch, which can now hype invite only services and drive traffic to it. Techomical says there are ethical problems with this, and I agree. But then, Arrington has dodged various ethical problems successfully so far.
More discussion here: Profy.Com, Insider Chatter, Download Squad and AppScout
On a lighter note, the equity of TechCrunch itself today took a dive after commenter K.Kaviraj wrote the following:
uuuwwooooowww ….. Mike — its really cool … I have been a Techcrunch reader for nearly 6 months …and its the first time u hav directly replied to me …… its really a gr8 feeeling yaaaaar
….. am gonna show this to all ma frnds … ( personally am a gr8 fan of u
) !!!
That comment is priceless.