Mashable To Sell To AOL?

Oh goodness… please let this not be true. If Yahoo! can kill great sites efficiently without a reason, AOL can do it just as well. I was reading an article on Inventorspot called Is “Mashable” Cashable? and I was angry – like angry I wanted to beat someone.

I do not care if Pete Cashmore is the “Brad Pitt of the Blogosphere”… selling Mashable to AOL is just insane. And yes, I am that passionate about saying that it is insane.

Pete, please keep Mashable longer until you can find someone that will not drive the site into the ground. When Mashable goes from its own writers and is bought by a bigger company like AOL, here are things that will eventually happen:

1. They try to open up writing positions to their own staff, who may have limited knowledge or interested in what the current writers of Mashable have done.
2. AOL buys Mashable and the current writers of Mashable slowly lose interest because AOL, a big company will take them for granted, and not even offer compensation. AOL has stocks, and Mashable could actually boost it.
3. AOL might enforce their own requirements on contributions.
4. AOL removes current Mashable writers, replaced them with their own employees, and then the site slowly dies out.
5. AOL gets an idea to combine Mashable with another site and it fails, and the site slowly dies out.
6. AOL fires everyone because their stocks drop, and well – their product SUCKS! (I was an AOL user YEARS ago, and it was just the worst choice in an ISP.)

The only way Mashable could survive from going from a startup that has become successful to being a successful section of a larger company is that AOL actually decides to pay any Mashable writers. The site is solely driven by people who volunteer there time. I am sure there are people getting paid.

AND… why is this even be consider, especially when even Mashable published AOL: We Need To Fire 2,500 Employees. Any Volunteers?

Does that make any sense?