"Well, unless AOL messes up my email inbox again:" I thought that was a joke at first, but apparently they are owned by AOL.<p>Are techcrunch employees required to use AOL Desktop? It looks the same as it did in 1998 <a href="http://daol.aol.com/software/aoldesktop97/" rel="nofollow">http://daol.aol.com/software/aoldesktop97/</a><p>AOL badly needs to rebrand themselves. It seems like the company has changed and is very profitable in recent years.<p>They could offer, "the greatest thing in the world, by AOL", but it's not a company I would ever do business with, I don't have a logical reason for this.<p>Fun fact: "at one point, half of the CDs manufactured worldwide had AOL logos on them" <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL</a> <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/27/aol-discs-90s/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/27/aol-discs-90s/</a>
In other words, TC does not approve charging money for providing a set of useful email addresses (even if it's wrapped in a neat Bootstrap/Stripe gift box) and regards it as good old <i>shady pro spammers</i>. It leads to young startups sending mass emails and giving headache to everybody on their path. They prefer to share their email addresses with you openly and free of charge.<p>Which brings us to the obvious question: Why is this on ProductHunt?
Is descending further down towards the bottom of the barrel to leech on more publicly available, easily harvested and/or less scarce items to sell at a markup a rising startup trend? It seems building novel value into a product is becoming less important to a segment of the startup industry. We now have selling of public parking spots, dinner reservations, and now email addresses. And while this model isn't new, there appears to be a popular reemergence of it.
TC doesn't seem opposed to PressFarm's success as a business. From the comments (Tsotsis is an editor at TC):<p><pre><code> Wouter Smet : ...with this post you just gifted Press Farm, apparently a super tiny company/web site, the exposure and traffic startups can only dream about....
Alexia Tsotsis : Oh, yeah, you're right, we totally didn't think of that angle. Oops!</code></pre>
This is just an email list? A more compelling product would connect a particular journalist with every story they've ever written, across all publications he/she's ever worked at. Then you could search articles by topic, type of product covered, sentiment towards particular vertical...etc and reach out only to the journalist that seem to have an interest in whatever story you're pitching.