At least three top names from the company have departed this month, including Brad Garlinghouse, head of the company’s Silicon Valley office, who quit last week. Mr Garlinghouse’s departure came on the same day that Sarah Lacy, a senior writer at TechCrunch, said she was leaving, and just days after Saul Hansell, a former New York Times reporter who was a senior editor at the Huffington Post, quit his job.

Last Thursday rumours surfaced that Heather Harde, chief executive of TechCrunch, was also leaving. Those reports were unconfirmed but came after the exits of two other senior writers for the technology blog, Paul Carr and MG Siegler, and the sacking of TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.

AOL acquired TechCrunch last year for $25m, part of chief executive Tim Armstrong’s plan to transform his company into a premium content destination that would be desirable to online advertisers.