If it's the pitching to/grooming of tech blogs, then companies themselves will decide what's effective for them. Number of referrals is surely just one measure. Credibility ("as featured on TechCrunch"), SEO (backlink from TC sounds good to me?), the fact that other journalists read TC, metablogs and so on.
If we're supposed to be ditching reading the blogs, well then folk will do that naturally over time if the quality of content falls.
More than anything, we should probably ditch the idea that one well-placed referral from a powerhouse could be the shot in the arm that might make a service "go viral".
I would guess it matters if you have a product that targets other startup-type people (e.g. some PaaS products), but otherwise I agree, the emphasis placed on it does seem odd. I had never heard of it before starting to read HN, and I still rarely see it mentioned elsewhere. Articles are linked here regularly, but the only TechCrunch article I can remember seeing linked in "regular" circles on the internet (i.e. anything other than startup-specific blogs/sites) was http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/women-in-tech-stop-blaming-..., which provoked a bunch of responses.
I've seen those "As seen on TC" images all over the web. It's to the point where they mean nothing to me.
And a backlink from TC is great, but I can count many many many sites with a backlink from TC that don't get powerful search engine traffic. It's still just 1 backlink.
If it's the pitching to/grooming of tech blogs, then companies themselves will decide what's effective for them. Number of referrals is surely just one measure. Credibility ("as featured on TechCrunch"), SEO (backlink from TC sounds good to me?), the fact that other journalists read TC, metablogs and so on.
If we're supposed to be ditching reading the blogs, well then folk will do that naturally over time if the quality of content falls.
More than anything, we should probably ditch the idea that one well-placed referral from a powerhouse could be the shot in the arm that might make a service "go viral".