Actually, this is pretty good news for TechCrunch to have gotten big enough they need a CEO … I mean, they are big and one of my favorite blogs to read - because there's always good stuff covered every day. in Welcome To TechCrunch, Heather, Michael Arrington breaks the news.

TechCrunch Traffic over the last 10 months:

Since last August, TechCrunch has been getting over 1 million visits a month and is now averaging about 2.5 million visits a month with over 300,000 subscribers - most of that traffic is not even reflected in Sitemeter (the RSS part - it's only going to show up if someone clicks on the story in Google Reader, Bloglines or MyYahoo! and goes to the site - if they just read the blog post in their reader - most of the traffic is not recorded since all they're reading is a cached version)

So … in the example below, I have highlighted in yellow those coming from a feed reader in the last 15 visits:

So, let's assume that 2 our of 15 visits actually is an RSS Subscriber - just for this arguement - Techcrunch's real readership is about 375,000 (daily visits + daily RSS Subscribers - 2/15th of the daily number because they're subscribers clicking though).

A site that big probably needs a CEO - content creation and business development are two seporate tracks once you get to be a certain size.  That seems to be Michael's thinking too:

"…It was tough to talk Heather out of leaving Fox, where she’s been for the last ten years. In that time she’s had a combination of operating and corporate development roles. Most recently, she was part of the founding executive team of Fox Interactive Media. At FIM she ran the mergers and acquisitions team, which was responsible for eight acquisitions, totaling $1.3 billion, and two equity investment deals. Prior to Fox, Heather was at business school at Harvard.

There is a lot for her to do. She will run every aspect of our business other than editorial, which I’ll be focusing on for now. TechCrunch has grown faster than I could manage over the last couple of years. Heather’s job will be to leverage the opportunities that we have sometimes let slip by, and to manage our organic and acquisition growth going forward."

Now, I just hope they have another TechCrunch event in NYC, like they did last November.