Engadget - a case study in the value of knowledge businesses

With knowledge businesses that have built up a great following and a "brand", the issue is always what value to attribute to the People and what to the Business (Processes, connections, brand etc etc). We now have a real case study to watch as the Engadget team leaves AOL to go elsewhere en masse - NYT:

Like many of its peers covering Silicon Valley, Engadget worked as a kind of permanent start-up, with 16-hour days to compete in the always-on news cycle, but AOL treated it as one more niche site. “We have been working on blogging technology that was developed in 2003, we haven’t made a hire since I started running the site, and I thought we could be more successful elsewhere,” said Joshua Topolsky, who was the editor of Engadget until the middle of last month.

So Mr. Topolsky and as many as eight of the more prominent editorial and technology staff members at Engadget have left or are leaving AOL and are about to build a new gadget site by joining forces with, yes, you guessed right, their old friend Mr. Bankoff, who now runs a federation of sports sites called SB Nation.

While there may still be a brand called Engadget at AOL, the people who made it a highly regarded site in a crowded category will be gone.

The whys are interesting but a sideshow, what will be interesting is to see the rate of value dissipation at Olde Engadget. One has to factor in the corporate peanut butter effect of AOL - but fortuntely we can map that to a recent acquisition - TechCrunch - and watch its position over the next 2 years as a reference line.