Most of the people commenting seem to have forgotten – your open memo trying to band together other bloggers – a commentary in which you laid out untrue statements about PaidContent and Rafat gave you a nice verbal spanking. Your statement about Rafat makes it quite clear – your are jealous Rafat was successful with his efforts.

Selling communities is hard because the seller can’t guarantee they’ll stay. It’s somewhat easier if you’ve got all their photos or videos. But TC can’t warranty to a buyer that we’ll all still be commenting.

There was a time when F*ckedCompany had a huge and active community of contributors. TC reminds me a lot of FC back in 2000.

And @ 16, I think you’re right on the money about TC’s audience providing a hefty does of TC’s overall value, but since when is selling a community of users really, really hard? Especially in the tech vertical where the perceived value of the users is much higher than, say, a community of dog walkers (nothing against them, of course), I’d think that other tech blogs (TC and Mashable come to mind) are well positioned.

Where on earth a $30 million valuation came from would be nice to know, though…seems pretty hefty.

I guess this puts TechCrunch’s value somewhere in the $150-200 million range. The TechCrunch network dominates ContentNext in traffic. Probably about 5 to 8 times more.