It is more than 15 minutes of fame because that blog post about a company will come up on google on the front page when someone searches for the company.
Being on techcrunch can give you long tail traffic and a bump in being viewed as "established".
The comments in the thread are making it read like getting on techcrunch isn't worth anything at all.
Also, if you get posted on TechCrunch, Slashdot, etc. you're likely to get written up on tens to hundreds of sites that just copy their content and likely to inspire many more sites (especially international) to write up reviews of your product.
After being posted, if you search for your product name you are likely to see lots of results. (People will pay for this.)
Agreed. I think there are many, many great reasons to announce news on TechCrunch. This post was merely meant to provide folks with a data point regarding how much traffic one site experienced from different types of announcements on TC.
