No one is blaming the advertisers. This is a fairly typical form of protest in this kind of situation. Complaining to or boycotting advertisers is a proxy for attacking the bottom line of a company that makes it money selling ad space. It's the only way to vote with your wallet when dealing with a media outlet because they're the ones footing the bill for the content we consume.

We don't need to worry much about the advertisers. They're not going to suffer. If they think it's worth their while they'll pull some ads or issue a stern warning. They're certainly not going to let it get to point where they're losing business.

Remember the Imus fiasco? People went crazy and threatened boycotts of all his advertisers. Al Sharpton was on TV every day raising hell about it and talking about all these scummy companies that supported him. They all dropped him the next day and now no one even remembers who was advertising on his show.

This has been going on since the very beginning of ad subsidized content. Censorship by sponsor.

Most of these companies are pretty awesome in their own right. We shouldn't stop doing business with them. But we should ask them why they want their names associated with this kind of "news".

He has been a douche for years, they know what's going on.

It doesn't say "Boycott these companies", it says "Ask these companies to stop advertising on TechCrunch", i.e., it's the active version of passively not reading TC anymore in hopes of drying up their dollars.

I think this "wall of shame" is absolutely ridiculous but:

I don't think anyone should be faulting the advertisers.

True, but I don't think that's the intention. The goal seems to be to make the advertisers aware of TC's transgressions to reduce the value of TC's advertising space (a despicable goal, in my book, but still).