Does TechCrunch Love Work?

My friend and fellow mesh organizer, Michael McDerment, has got himself some TechCrunch Love for Freshbooks, a cool Web-based invoicing company. Freshbooks, which is based in Toronto, recently unveiled a new service that lets users send invoices to customers by first-class U.S. Mail rather than over the Web. As everyone knows, TechCrunch has become the way to launch a new Web 2.0 company and/or service but I wonder how much actual “juice” these profiled companies receive. Does traffic suddenly to their Web sites suddenly surge and then level off to a healthy level? Do VCs look at TechCrunch Love as a positive endorsement that deems a company worthy of investment? Does TechCrunch have that much influence? Maybe. Then again, TechCrunch crunches through an awful lot of companies every week/month so it becomes more difficult to tell what companies are really on to something and what companies/services are simply new. In terms of Freshbooks, a little TechCrunch Love can only be a good thing given it’s a real company with paying customers that generates revenue – which makes it a bit of an anomaly within the Web 2.0 landscape.