The Huffington Post Media Group (HPMG), which I should point out is owned by our parent company AOL, is to announce an acquisition today, along with some key stats, hires and new site launches. Kara Swisher obtained and published the press release.
HMPG has acquired Localocracy, an “online town common” where registered voters weigh in on local issues and come together to solve problems in their communities, using their real names. → Read More
Earlier tonight, Yahoo announced that they grabbed one from our side to be the new Editor in Chief of their Yahoo Media Network: Jai Singh. Singh had been the Executive Editor at Huffington Post (and more recently, AOL HuffPo) for the past two years, where he helped shaped the company into the news and information juggernaut that it has become. Now we know who his replacement will be: Nico Pitney.
Pitney was previously the Executive Editor of The Huffington Post, having risen through the ranks after serving as the Politics Editor during the 2008 Presidential campaign (and eventually becoming the National Editor and Washington Bureau Chief). Below, find Arianna Huffington’s brief memo on the move (meeting place and time redacted in case of weirdos lurking around the NYT office): → Read More
As part of the AdTech conference yesterday, a gaggle of press got together to talk to Huffington Post Media Group’s Arianna Huffington, a. k. a my bosses’ boss and Tim Richards, VP of Ad Sales at AOL West Coast. While the cupcake and jelly bean-embellished media roundtable was billed as a discussion about vague stuff like “how to move and engage audiences” and the “importance of being authentic” we ended up talking lawsuit, layoffs and the difference between a blogger and a writer real fast.
In the video Huffington, who is extremely charismatic, talks about her goal of setting a clear editorial direction for AOL, which now has 107 brands and 56 editorial properties post-Huffington Post acquisition, “Within a year you won’t be able to tell whether a site originated as an AOL site or a Huffington Post site.” → Read More
In a move sure to irk at least two or three people who work for The New York Times, The Huffington Post (owned by AOL, our own masters in some degree of command) has put up a paywall that applies only to NYT employees.
In a message to affected potential readers of HuffPost content, founder Arianna Huffington explains that NYT employees can henceforth access only one article for free per month. → Read More
Sister site The Huffington Post just went on a journalistic hiring spree (hide your bloggers/hide your editors), scooping up New York Times editor Maura Egan, who will be Deputy Entertainment and Culture Editor under recent hire and fellow NYT alum John Montorio, along with Reason’s Radley Balko who joins as a Criminal Justice Reporter, Rebecca Carroll who comes on as Culture Editor of Black Voices, GOOD’s Amanda Millner Fairbanks as Education Reporter, and Jaweed Kaleem as Religion Reporter. → Read More
As we’ve heard over the past few days, AOL has started implementing layoffs across its properties in the wake of the Huffington Post acquisition. The deal, which amounted to $315 million, closed on Monday of this week. We’ve confirmed the firings with AOL and here is the breakdown of the exact numbers and where the layoffs will take place.
AOL will be letting go a little over 200 U.S. employees, around 120 of which are editorial staffers. The remaining employees that are being let go also work in AOL’s media business but in other operations (technology, product). With the merger with the Huffington Post, AOL will actually be gaining 250 employees from the media property, around 150 of which are editorial staffers. AOL says that after the merger, there is a net gain of 17 editorial staffers. And including Patch, AOL still employs 1,200 journalists in editorial. → Read More
Well that was fast. AOL has closed its $315 million acquisition of The Huffington Post. The deal was originally announced on February 6, so it’s taken a month for the acquisition to close.
As we heard a few weeks ago, Arianna Huffington is now the President and Editor In Chief of all of AOL’s media properties, which is now called the Huffington Post Media Group (and which includes TechCrunch). → Read More
Aside from Sarah and Paul’s strange Bieber-based attempts at SEO, I haven’t noticed many changes around here since some AOL people and then Arianna Huffington became my uber bosses. I mean I still get paid to work and everything which is cool so + 1!
But really my AOL hat really isn’t enough to keep me from absolutely loving what Stephen Colbert just did in an acutely searing critique of The Huffington Post’s controversial content practices. → Read More
It’s rare that we get access to insider information as AOL employees here at TechCrunch HQ, so we have to rely on our mad reporting skills and the strength of our inboxes in order to figure out the goings on over in Dulles and at 770 Broadway. We’ve received this “Winter Luge and HuffPost Quick Update” email multiple times today, but none through any legitimate AOL channels. So I guess this means we can take off our AOL hats and just repost it (yay pageviews!).
In the email, AOL head honcho Tim Armstrong welcomes content maven Arianna Huffington to the AOL family with colorful exaggerated reference to the over 4000 articles written about the AOL/Huffington Post acquisition last week, apparently signifying an AOL comeback. The email goes on to explore how close we are to our very ambitious Winter Luge Q1 goals which are indeed very very ambitious. → Read More
Ever since AOL announced its $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post, pundits have been asking what does it mean? Well, look no further. Funny or Die created the faux infommercial above that looks like it was shot 15 years ago. The tagline is, “AOL and the Huffington Post: Bringing the future back to 1996.”
Basically, what you get with AOL-HuffPo are Alec Baldwin editorials and cybersex chatrooms filled with midwestern housewives. Oh, and you can also download your favorite Wav files of Arianna Huffington quotes, which you can listen to every time you get a new email: “Master the Internet.” I am downloading some right now at AOL HQ, from where I’m writing this post. → Read More
So I think TechCrunch might have acquired the Huffington Post fro $315 million or something. I’m not too sure, I try to stay out of this news stuff. Thankfully there’s this helpful Next Media Animation that tries to explain things; From Tim Armstrong (tarmstrong@aol.com) bidding on HuffPo on eBay to Huffington pulling a Wizard of Oz on rivals Hot Air, Gawker and Drudge Report, to the portral of Bebo as a literal monkey on Aol’s back, I think it pretty much sums it up.
My favorite part, Aol’s goals for 2011: “Make it 1997 again through science or magic.” → Read More
Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington hosted a conference call with analysts this morning to discuss AOL’s announced $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post. The Huffington Post is expected to contribute $50 million in revenues this year, and quickly ramp up to a $100 million revenue run-rate. That still represents a tiny portion of AOL’s $2.4 billion in revenue, but it is Armstrong’s largest acquisition to date, and his team believes it will help put AOL over the top in terms of putting the company on a growth track again by 2013 in terms of adjusted EBITDA.
Armstrong re-emphasized, as he did in an internal memo last night, that the driving factors behind the deal was how well the Huffington Post fit into the wheelhouse he is trying to build, particularly around women, influencers, and local (his 80-80-80 strategy). The Huffington Post was planning a massive expansion into both local and global coverage in 2011 as it was preparing for a possible IPO, and Huffington feels that the deal will help accelerate those plans. In particular she feels an affinity with Patch, AOL’s burgeoning local news properties. In terms of women’s content, specifically, Armstrong says it is “an area we feel the Web has been lacking, and Arianna is one of the world’s experts.” → Read More
At midnight, AOL announced that it will buy the Huffington Post for $315 million. Below is the internal memo AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sent to all AOL employees (except us, they don’t trust us with anything) about the transaction. In between the corporate speak, he points out that a combined AOL and Huffington Post will have 117 million unduplicated unique visitors per month in the U.S., and outlines the new organizational structure with Arianna Huffington as Editor In Chief of all of AOL’s media properties, including TechCrunch. AOL exec Jon Brod will be overseeing the integration from an operational perspective on the AOL side.
(Memo after the jump). → Read More
You know who won the Super Bowl? Arianna Huffington. Our parent company Aol just bought Huffington Post for $315 million this afternoon according to a release. The Huffington Post, with 26 million unique visitors monthly is huge, one of the most prominent media properties on the Internet because of its aggressive SEO stance, and has gone through the acquisition motions before, most notably Yahoo. Apparently this time it stuck.
In this video, Armstrong and Huffington recall the acquisition process: The two met in November and Arianna was impressed with the “surprising merger” of their vision. And no doubt the sizable amount of the Aol offer, which at $65 million was 5x Huffington Post’s revenue. The talks took three months. → Read More
A coalition of non-profit organizations, technology developers, designers, marketers and others has unveiled the alpha version of a new Web service dubbed All for Good in an effort to build some sort of ‘Craigslist for volunteer services’. The metaphor stands, and not only because Craig Newmark from the popular free classifieds service is one of the backers of the project (Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post is also said to be on board).
All for Good basically lets you browse volunteer activities and find related events based on your geographical location and/or interests. The site brings together listings from organizations and local groups to help you find volunteer activities that fit your time and talent. If you ‘like’ a certain item, you can share it with your friends across various social networking services, hopefully spawning more attention and the possibility for the activity or event to spread virally within your network. → Read More
Conservative political pundit Tucker Carlson is planning to launch a political news competitor to the Huffington Post, reports The Hill today. The site will be called TheDailyCaller.com and will be focused on reporting news about the Obama Administration but will add “facts to the conversation.”
Implying that the Huffington Post’s coverage is biased, Carlson said that The DailyCaller will be dedicated to “telling the truth and be accurate.” The site’s reporters will share in the profits of the news site based on how much traffic reporters get for their stories. According to Carlson the site’s motto is “every seven minutes,” and will be speedier than its competitors, including HuffPo and The Drudge Report. → Read More
After showing hockey-stick growth leading up to the U.S. Presidential Elections, Twitter took a breather in November. According to comScore, unique U.S. visitors to Twitter.com grew less than one percent sequentially from October to 1.466 million. U.S. pageviews declined more precipitously to 19.7 million, from 37.2 million in October (a 47 percent decline).
These numbers suggest that about the same number of people are still visiting Twitter, but without all the election Tweets, they are only finding half as much to keep them interested. → Read More
We already knew The Huffington Post was looking for capital, but it turns out to be a little more than the $15 million the Times of London projected earlier. Kara Swisher says the political uber-blog network has in fact raised $25 million from Oak Investment Partners and will announce the news later this morning.
This third round brings the total amount of funding raised to a whopping $37 million. When The HuffPo raised its $5 million Series B round in September last year, we wondered how much it was worth. Kara’s source indicates the valuation is ‘just south of $100 million’. → Read More
The elections were good to the HuffingtonPost, the political uber-blog. It’s audience in the U.S. rose fivefold in the last year to 5 million monthly uniques in October, according to comScore. In what may turn out to be perfect market timing, the Times UK is reporting that the company is close to raising $15 million. In the past, it has raised a total of $12 million from investors including Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Bob Pittman, and Ken Lerer.
As with all political sites, it is likely that the HuffPo’s traffic will dip now that the election fever is over. The question for investors, though, is whether its current levels represent a peak or, whether it can take advantage of its new-found audience to establish a solid, new traffic floor from which to keep growing. If you look at the HuffPo’s chart from Google Trends (above), it looks like traffic is at the very least plateauing so far in November, as you would expect.
Where does it go from here? → Read More
The Huffington Post hired CBSNews.com’s general manager Betsy Morgan as its new CEO. Current CEO Kenneth Lerer moves up to chairman. All the pieces are falling into place just in time for election season. This should be fun to watch. Can you say IPO? → Read More
