TechCrunch writer caught fibbing about startup numbers
TechCrunch writer Daniel Brusilovsky, the 16 year old wunderkid behind the TechCrunch pumped “Teens in Tech” WordPress MU blog network has been fibbing about usage numbers on his site.
Brusilovsky has previously claimed publicly that Teens in Tech had over 10,000 registered users, a reasonable sort of number for a very basic WordPress MU setup. It turns out though that the number is more than a slight exaggeration: the MU install was hacked with the real data found its way to Net News Daily.
The complete number of registered users (this figure includes inactive members): 421. Turns out that Daniel not only added a zero to the end of the actual number, but doubled it again just for good measure.
I don’t know a lot about Daniel besides always thinking it was very strange that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington was pumping a very basic blog network that would only appear to stand out from hundreds of other small scale unfunded blog networks because Daniel was 15 when he started it. I do have it on good authority though from someone who has dealt with him that he’s not a bad kid and has some talent.
The lesson here is that if you boast about site numbers, the numbers you quote should have some reflection in reality because if they don’t, eventually someone will find out.
