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.

According to the release, The Huffington Post has recruited its leadership team (founders Conor White-Sullivan and Aaron Soules, and tech lead Jay Boice).

According to Swisher, HPMG paid less than $1 million for Localocracy.

The Huffington Post is also launching four sites this week (Huff/Post50, HuffPost Gay Voices, HuffPost Weddings and HuffPost High School), the latest of 21 new verticals since the merger with AOL, which occurred last March.

In addition, HMPG says it has hired former NYT blogger Lisa Belkin as Senior Columnist; she’ll be covering parenting, work/life balance and family.

Finally, The Huffington Post says it has recorded its largest number of unique monthly visitors ever (37 million), and for the first time topped 1 billion page views.

The network also posted a record 5.1 million comments in August 2011.

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):

I’m delighted to announce that Nico will become the Managing Editor of The Huffington Post Media Group. Jai and I have been talking for some time about his desire to return home to California and his family. We are very grateful to him for his great work and wish him all the best in his next adventure. So please join me at XXXXX today in the XXXXXX to raise a glass to Nico and say farewell to Jai.

Arianna

In the release announcing the Singh hire, Yahoo made an even bigger deal about “its largest traffic numbers for a single event”. No, it wasn’t the Bin Laden death — it was the royal wedding. Says Yahoo:

Preliminary internal data shows that Yahoo! sites serving Royal Wedding content drove 400 million page views on Friday, slightly higher than the traffic levels experienced following the Japan earthquake.

Seems like that news and the major new hire should have had their own separate releases, no?

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.”

She wants to turn AOL into what she calls “the media company of the 21st century,” through a convergence (heh) of the best parts of traditional media and online journalism, “to bring together the best of the old world: fact checking, accuracy, fairness, and design and the best of the new world: realtime, immediacy and transparency.”

When asked how this grand vision squared with former Engadget editor Paul Miller’s assertion that AOL had “its heart in the wrong place with regards to content,” Huffington responded:

“He was talking about a time that is very different from what we are doing now. All these things preceded what we are doing now and a lot of things preceded Tim Armstrong being the CEO of AOL. One of the problems with a company that has had a relatively long life on the internet is that everything has been subsumed under the AOL brand and a lot of things really don’t belong any more.”

The whole interview is filled with gems like this. If you’re a fan of online media and tech it’s worth watching through the entire 56 minutes and 40 seconds but if you don’t have the time jump to minute 53:17 when Twitter’s Biz Stone randomly walks just as Huffington is talking about acquisitions (which aren’t “imminent” she says), “Right now I’m so focused on working with what we have.” I believe it.

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.

If they’d like to read more letters or view some slideshows of cute kittens, they can subscribe to one of the media company’s NYT Employee Digital Subscription Plans®.

According to people familiar with the matter, all people at the NYT building today who try to access The Huffington Post won’t be able to.

Dear New York Times Employee, thank you for visiting The Huffington Post!

We hope you’ve enjoyed your one free article this month.

As you may know, we are now charging New York Times employees for unlimited access to our content. You can come back next month for another free article or choose one of our NYT Employee Digital Subscription Plans ®.

In our most popular plan, Times employees can view the first 6 letters of each word at no charge (including slideshows of adorable kittens). After 6 letters, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber.

Subscribing is quick and easy.

Unfortunately for those interested in subscribing, the HuffPost’s payment server, curiously named April Fools, is currently unavailable.

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.

But the most interesting HuffPo new hire doesn’t bring the added name value of an old media publication or any publication for that matter. It’s Christopher Spurlock, a journalism student at the University of Missouri, whose ambitious resume as an infographic was posted to Huffington Post College on February 25th, and proceeded to go viral after Huffington Post Traffic and Trends editor Craig Kanalley tweeted it out to his 5,800 followers.

The original post, which amassing thousands of Facebook “Likes,” hundreds of tweets, and tens of thousands of pageviews, eventually convinced Kanalley to bring on Spurlock as a Huffington Post Infographic Design Editor, but not before Kanalley wrote a followup post “How to Make Your Resume Stand Out: 5 Tips From Chris Spurlock.” Indeed.

Kanalley weighed in on the hire, “It’s a step towards high quality content, stuff that people like. I definitely think it’s a continued move towards better journalism and a better site for us.”

The fact that a news organization as large as The Huffington Post is hiring into a full-time Infographic Design Editor position is a serious indicator of the state of journalism to come, and not necessarily in a bad way.  After all, you can’t game searches for infographics like you can for posts about what time the Super Bowl starts. People actually have to want to share them in order for a publication to derive traffic benefits.

And almost everyone, but especially the self taught Spurlock, loves infographics. Spurlock’s so obsessed that he eventually wants to build a J-School curriculum for people interesting in making visual displays of factual information.

Says Spurlock, “I always keep a Twitter search handy for the word ‘infographic,’ and every day there’s something that’s huge. That’s been retweeted a thousand times.” Imagine his amazement when his own creation eventually met with the same fate.

“It’s something new and developing,” says Spurlock on his unique niche, “So there’s not really a place for it yet.“ When asked what his advice would be for J-School students trying to replicate his mainstream media success, “Do something different. You just got to get noticed, and it’s hard when the number of Journalism grads is increasing and the number of jobs is decreasing. But if you want someone to pay attention to you you have to make them.”

Welcome to the Internet, Chris.

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.

In total, India’s casualties are above 700 employees. In India, AOL will be letting go around 400 employees and transitioning around approximately 300 employees to become contractors. We understand that in Asia, AOL wants staffers to focus on creating products for the Asian markets as opposed to providing back-end support to global operations.

So in total, today’s bloodbath has resulted in AOL is shedding just under 1,000 employees.

The layoffs resulted from eliminating the redundancies created by merging The Huffington Post with AOL’s content properties. 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).

This isn’t the largest set of layoffs for AOL—the company let 2,000 employees go in 2007 and gave 700 staffers pink slips in 2009. And when AOL spun off from Time Warner, it also suffered massive layoffs.

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).

AOL says the the combined entity will have a user base of 117 million unique visitors a month in the United States and 253 million around the world, according to comScore. For AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, The HuffPo acquisition is his largest deal to date.

Along with the closing of the acquisition, AOL has also poached a number of talented new writers to join its newly formed team. Yahoo’s Michael Calderone has been named Senior Media Reporter, the New York Times’ Trymaine Lee has been named Senior Reporter, the New York Daily News’ Michael McAuliff has been named Senior Congressional Reporter, and The Daily’s Jon Ward has been named Senior Political Reporter. Bonnie Kavoussi will be Business Reporter, and Lucas Kavner has been named Entertainment Reporter.

With the acquisition, AOL is buying into the new publishing model that the Huffington Post represents. Armstrong has said that the the driving factors behind the deal is how well the Huffington Post fits into the content platform he is trying to build, particularly around women, influencers, and local (his 80-80-80 strategy).

Tim and Arianna have been on a roadshow of sorts, explaining the new content strategy to the public. As we know, there will be layoffs, Hollywood, and more.

Disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch.

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.

On his show tonight Colbert, frustrated with all the free content Arianna Huffington has been glomming off “The Colbert Report” and others, announced that he would build his own site and call it “The Colbuffington Re-Post.”  The Colbuffington Re-Post has “everything you love about the Huffington Post because it is the Huffington Post with a new border around it that says the Colbuffington Re-Post.”

Har har indeed, except that when you actually visit TheColbuffingtonRepost.com, it truly serves up an exact copy of The Huffington Post with Stephen Colbert’s Colbuffington Re-Post logo. a) I’m not sure this is even legal. b) Just wait ’til Arianna gets a load of this.

And sure The Huffington Post might just repost this story and somehow find a way to monetize it all and true we’re getting traffic of this too (Thank you for the free content Stephen) … But aside from what this means in terms of eCPM or whatever the business model is these days, we as consumers and producers of media must sit back and appreciate the sheer ingenuity of The Colbuffington Re-Post, at least for a moment. You win Colbert.

Notable quotes from the above clip:

“I’m a big fan of the Internet, it can answer any question from ‘Where can I get a pair of pants?’ to ‘Where is the porn?’ to ‘Woo boy where can I get another pair of pants?’”

“Huffpo is famous for its extensive comprehensive coverage of things other people produced and put on the Internet.”

“Hopefully HuffPo will be a new source of revenue for AOL, whose income currently depends on 82 year old Delaware resident Claire Meyers and the $10 an hour she still pays for dial up service.”

“You have acheived the impossible, you have made me feel angry while looking at pictures of myself. “

“Where’s my money Arianna? Don’t make me put on my rings”

“And I am proud to announce that the Colbuffington Re-Post is for sale for $316 million. Arianna if I find a buyer, I promise to give you the same cut you give me.”

Ouch.

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.

The prognosis? Not so close. We’ve got a lot of work to do AOL Lugers! There’s a lot of juicy stuff here, but for the sake of brevity let’s just take on our goal of double the pageviews to the AOL homescreen by March 31st.

The email trumpets a 6% traffic increase of 50 Million homepage pageviews from December to January. Working backwards based on those numbers, the AOL Homepage got approximately 833 million views in December, 883 million views in January, and we’re aiming to hit around 1.66 billion monthly views in just two months. (I’m assuming these are internal AOL analytics since the Comscore numbers for the AOL Welcome Screen actually show a decrease in views.)

Damn. Is this in any way possible to achieve? Well we could amp up IRL marketing, pick Huffington’s brain on maximizing search traffic and social while we wait about a month for The Huffington Post’s HSR to clear and work on redirection among all branded properties (Hi Josh). But even if we increased at rate of 10% a month, for the next six months, we still wouldn’t hit that number.

Sprechen sie AOL Way?

Full email below.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Armstrong, Tim
Date: Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 1:23 PM
Subject: Winter Luge and HuffPost Quick Update
To: “Armstrong, Tim”

AOLers -

We are on the comeback and if the 4,000 articles on AOL and The
Huffington Post over the last week didn’t send that message, nothing
will. As we discussed last year, opportunities are opportunities
because not everyone can see them and we now have an even bigger
opportunity in front of us. Arianna Huffington and the team at The
Huffington Post see the same vision we see and we will accelerate
together.

Staying right on course, AOL is aiming to be the largest high-quality
content producer for digital media – locally, regionally, nationally,
and globally. By producing great content for consumers and offering
differentiated advertising solutions (Project Devil and Local), we
will have a profitable, growing, and sustainable business model built
for where the web is going. This week, there are a number of areas we
will begin planning this week in connection with the deal closing, and
as an employees-first culture, we wanted to share some of the areas of
opportunity we will be looking at:

· Journalist / Creative Culture Investment: We have a big
opportunity to create the next evolution of the content culture.
Creativity has been a big part of the AOL comeback and it will be an
even bigger part of the future with The Huffington Post Media Group.

· Local to Regional to National to Global: We can help
consumers and marketers from the world they live in to the house they
live in. AOL and The Huffington Post are uniquely structured to
create the new way information gets shared across the globe and across
your town. AOL’s large, local reach and focus/investment in mobile
platforms are extremely powerful when coupled with The Huffington
Post’s global reach.

· Video: AOL has invested in video production and distribution
around the globe over the last year and we have strengthened our
position in many markets. The Huffington Post was about to invest
heavily in video—now our combined company has the ability to create a
video version of The Huffington Post and continue growing video across
AOL properties; this offers our partners many valuable options.

· Brand Advertising: Project Devil went live on the AOL.com
homepage yesterday and we are just beginning to see the impact of the
brand ads movement online. The Huffington Post and AOL have combined
audiences that index very high on education and affluent income levels
and we can have a significant offering in the advertising market. If
you want to reach the most valuable consumers one-on-one, we’ll be the
place. It’s time for brands to step into the web and we have the
first and best step for them to make.

· Culture of Help: AOL’s number one value is to help others
and we have done a great job of that with our volunteer days and our
homepage cause marketing support. The Huffington Post has provided a
platform for many of the causes and cause leaders to blog and has a
full-time cause marketing team and many partnerships. Together, we can
help drive the civic-minded solutions the world needs.

· North Star Goals: Our goals are still the same and will be
accelerated by this deal – grow unique visitors, grow brand
advertising, scale locally – and underline those three goals with
video and mobile.

Over the course of this week, we will start to sketch out the future
of the combined companies. Our executive team and Arianna’s team are
working closely together on planning the integration of the two
companies and we would expect to move quickly with any changes once
the deal is closed.

We need to all remain laser-focused on our Winter Luge goals. We are
at the halfway point in our ambitious plan for the winter and I wanted
to give you a quick status update on what we have achieved so far:

Grow ad sales revenue by a double-digit increase—Entire sales and
sales support team has been trained on AOL Way for Advertising and
presales has been reorganized to line up to the top 100 accounts.

Double homepage traffic—Grew monthly PVs on AOL.com by 50MM (6%) in
January vs. December and late night grew 212%. Minutes per visitor per
month have increased 33% yoy to 40.4 minutes in January—this leads all
competitors (MSN – 36.5 minutes; Yahoo – 32.9 minutes; NYT – 30
minutes); we still have a lot of work to do, but this is a huge win.

AOL Way for Media—Entire media team has been trained on the AOL Way
and the operations team has created great reporting tools to track our
progress.

Achieve 99.9% reliability for email—Thoroughly analyzed all components
of the mail system and have started implementing a series of fixes and
process improvements. The team is working on the V2 architecture for
long term reliability and functionality improvements.

Double Patch engagement—Visits/UV grew 6% in January while UVs grew 32%.

Ads/Content Platform + Devil everywhere—Only 24 Blogsmith migrations
remain; Seed 2.0 in Alpha; Dynamic ad sizing for Devil 2.0 in
production. We are now focusing on implementing AdLearn 5.0, improving
our DSP solution, and making booking an ad campaign 70% faster

Close partnership / M&A deals inline with our strategy—GoViral and
Huffington Post deals signed; also partnerships with Everyday Health,
SportingNews and Move.com signed.

Culture luge—We have made great strides in growing our culture of
performance and accountability, we have celebrated our successes with
the weekly Attitude Alerts and Accelerator Thursdays and are
furthering our culture of teamwork as we moved the New York office to
sit in their teams and towns.

Recruit top talent—Job applications for open positions have gone WAY
up, the world is watching and is noticing the huge cultural shift; we
have filled 33% of the top 12 open positions.

We have accomplished a lot in the Winter Luge in the first half and
need to maintain this sharp focus through the end. Let’s finish the
Luge strong!

As we discussed at the all-hands meeting a few weeks ago, we have a
long-term vision for this space and we will continue to move AOL into
a leadership position in the digital content business. The comeback
is on and we’re going to deliver to our consumers, customers,
partners, shareholders – and most importantly – you. Let’s keep
getting it done and have fun doing it. Go AOL

- TA

Image above from actual AOL Luge event.

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.

(For a more sinister video parody, check this one out).

So I think TechCrunch might have acquired the Huffington Post for $315 million or something. I’m not too sure, I try to stay out of this news stuff. Thankfully there’s this helpful and poetic Next Media Animation that tries to explain things. From Aol head Tim Armstrong (tarmstrong@aol.com) bidding for HuffPo on eBay to Arianna 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 the whole situation up.

My favorite part, Aol’s goals for 2011: “Make it 1997 again through science or magic.”

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.

It is clear that the deal is as much about buying into the new publishing model that the Huffington Post represents (which is in keeping with AOL’s acquisition of TechCrunch and emphasis on blogs like Engadget on the tech side). And it is about buying talent, both at the top and throughout Huffington Post on the editorial and sales side. Asked how long she plans to stay, Huffington says, “I told Tim I want to stay forever. This is my last act.” She has a multi-year contract at the very least, and AOL typically likes to structure deals with financial incentives that keeps top talent on board for at least two to three years. “Our only thing when we do acquisitions,” says Armstrong, “the price has to be fair, it has to fit the strategy, and the entrepreneurs have to stay.”

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.”

Both the Huffington Post and AOL have been called out in the past for pursuing SEO-optimized content strategies (known internally at AOL as “The AOL Way”). But one point Armstrong tried to make is that AOL is pursuing multiple content strategies at the same time and will continue to do so. “The AOL Way is just one of the ways we are working on content.” It’s obviously going to be a mix of high-brow and low-brow going forward. “Our strategy is premium content and magical experiences,” he says. “A lot of time that gets confused. Things like Seed and Studio Now are platforms to help you do whatever you want—high quality, low quality.”

I was able to speak with Armstrong and Huffington briefly after the conference call. Of course, my first question was, does she plan to leave Techcrunch and other strong brands alone or will all the properties now be subsumed under one brand. “At the Huffington Post our goal has been to turn our sections into destination sites. When you are given destination sites that is incredibly fortunate,” she assured me. “It is highly unlikely that TechCrunch, Engadget, or MovieFone will go away,” added Armstrong. In areas where AOL does not have distinct brands, however, those operations will be recast in ways that make the most sense.

One of the draws for Armstrong, beyond the media brand Huffington has built, is the technology underlying the site. The Huffington Post has done an incredible job engaging its readers to become contributors through comments, blog posts, and social features. Huffington will be looking to spread some of that social DNA throughout the rest of AOL. I also asked about the different content managent systems (CMS). AOL has been consolidating down from 24 to 2, and now HuffPo’s will be a third. That seems to be a TBD item, but it sounds like HuffPo will keep its CMS for a while, while the rest of AOL will keep consolidating.

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.

——————–
AOLers,

We are taking another major step in the comeback of AOL. Today we are announcing that we have agreed to acquire The Huffington Post, one of the most exciting, influential, and fastest growing properties on the Internet. We believe in brands, quality journalism, and the positive role of communities in the world—The Huffington Post shares our values and the combination of the two companies will create the premier global and local media company on the Internet.

Co-founded six years ago by Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer, The Huffington Post has grown to become an industry leader—one of the Web’s most popular and innovative sources of online news, commentary, and information. Arianna and team have created a brand and a destination that focuses on the consumer experience. By combining The Huffington Post with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video offerings, local expertise and enormous reach, we will create a company that is laser-focused on serving our audiences across every platform imaginable – social, local, video, mobile and tablet.

The Huffington Post is core to our strategy and our 80:80:80 focus – 80% of domestic spending is done by women, 80% of commerce happens locally and 80% of considered purchases are driven by influencers. The influencer part of the strategy is important and will be potent.

The Huffington Post is a strong influencer brand and it attracts a valuable audience, including a great focus on women’s content. In addition, Arianna Huffington is a world-renowned expert on women’s topics and issues, and has enabled The Huffington Post to grow rapidly by continually developing new audiences.

In the local area, the combination of the two companies will create a scaled connection between global and local communities on one platform. This will create a new way for people to get local and global information in a timely and entertaining way.

The Huffington Post will join the family of AOL Brands that are destinations for an influencer audience, brands like TechCrunch, Engadget, AutoBlog, and Moviefone. Uniquely, The Huffington Post is the platform for influential people — the people that drive trends, commerce, politics, entertainment, news, and information. Adding this strategic platform to our already strong network of sites, including the AOL homepage, has the potential to make AOL the most influential company in the content space.

Arianna Huffington is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the Internet space and someone that is even more successful in building communities and relationships in every corner of the globe. The Huffington Post and Arianna have created a company that has partnered with the most successful and well-known leaders in all aspects of society that touch important topics to give consumers direct access to the most influential decision makers and community leaders.

This acquisition will create a high-quality and diverse digital ecosystem encompassing local, national and international news, politics, entertainment, technology, fashion, sports, health, personal finance, green, lifestyle, the arts and more. This deal will combine the amazing talent at AOL with the innovative and talented staff of The Huffington Post. Here are just a few high-level points around what this deal brings to market:

• Together, AOL and The Huffington Post will have 117MM unduplicated domestic monthly UVs, and ~270MM monthly UVs worldwide (according to comScore Dec 2010).
• The Huffington Post is one of the fastest growing web properties on the Internet. It grew 22% last year – that’s faster than Twitter, which grew 18% – and 15x as quickly as the Internet grew last year (comScore Dec ’09-’10).
• Both AOL and The Huffington Post count powerful, affluent users among their top loyal visitors, significantly over-indexing in $100K+ income users.
• AOL passed Hulu in unique viewers on video in the fourth quarter of 2010; video views on AOL are up 400 percent year-over-year.
• Between AOL’s innovative Project Devil ad unit, engaging users for 27 seconds longer than traditional display ads, and The Huffington Post’s highly-vocal community, with 4MM+ comments per month, we will marry attention-grabbing content and brand experiences for both advertisers and consumers.

In the local area, the combination of the two companies will create a premier global/local syndication network at scale. This will create a new way for people to get local and global information in a timely, informative and entertaining way.

To maximize the strategic advantage of this great deal, we will be creating a new group at AOL called The Huffington Post Media Group. Within this group will be AOL Media, AOL Local & Mapping, AOL Search and our new friends at The Huffington Post. We will continue operating the towns structure, AOL.com and HuffingtonPost.com.

I’m thrilled to announce that Arianna Huffington will join AOL’s executive team as President and Editor in Chief of The Huffington Post Media Group. We have asked Jon Brod to lead the overall operational integration on the AOL side of the combined entities. Jon will lead the local group integration and work closely with David Eun and the teams in AOL Media. We will work quickly with The Huffington Post to create a combined organizational design to coincide with the deal closing. While we wait for the required regulatory reviews to be completed and the transaction to close before implementing the design, we will move very quickly to plan the details of the integration of the two companies. To this end, we will announce the new organizational structure as soon as possible.

In the meantime, we will continue creating great content and products for our consumers within the town structure and stay laser-focused on the aggressive goals we have set for our winter luge. We are on the right track and will continue our weekly operating cadence and town structure to drive successful results against our company goals.

Here’s a special message for all of you we taped to welcome The Huffington Post and Arianna to our AOL Family:

http://today.office.aol.com/company-news/2011/02/aol-agrees-buy-huffington-post

And of course we wanted to welcome Arianna to our “You’ve Got” video of the day—check her out on AOL.com.

We will be holding a company all hands meeting to address your questions related to today’s exciting news. We will video conference from our New York office on the 6th Floor at 9:30 AM ET and will be joined by Arianna Huffington and key executives from her organization. We will also be holding a call for our west coast offices at 2:00 PM ET and for our Patch offices at 2:45 PM ET. See below for meeting info (conference rooms will be sent out shortly).

AOL is playing to win…and The Huffington Post and AOL will occupy a unique place in the future of the Internet. Let’s go get it done.

–TA

The Huffington Post, with its 26 million monthly unique visitors is huge, one of the most prominent media properties on the Internet because of its aggressive SEO stance. And the company 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 Huffington was impressed with the “surprising merger” of their vision. And no doubt the sizable amount of the Aol offer, which at $315 million is just under 5x Huffington Post’s expected revenue for next year.  The talks took three months. “This is my last act,” Huffington said.

Back in June we pegged a possible Aol and Yahoo deal at around $360 million, Aol paid $45 million less than that at $315 million this time.

To all of you making HuffingtonCrunch and Crunchington Post jokes, Huffington’s official title will be Editor In Chief in charge of all Aol properties, including Engadget, Urlesque and yes us. Welcome to the family, Arianna.

You can read more about how we feel about this acquisition here and here.

This news was first reported by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.

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.

According to the about page, All for Good was “inspired by the call of President Obama to engage more Americans in service”. The link to the White House is notable: according to a report by MSNBC, the seeds for All for Good were planted by people who advised Barack Obama during the transition period. Two names that circulate: Jonathan Greenblatt, a faculty member at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California at LA, and Sonal Shah, former head of global development at Google.org who currently leads the new White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. The report also cites Kate Bedingfield, a White House spokeswoman, who apparently said she felt All for Good is “an exciting and innovative idea” and added that the White House is working with the corporation to explore ways to use the tool.

The site is in the process of being transferred to a new non-profit organization called Our Good Works, formed by some of the people who initiated the project. For the moment, the project is hosted and managed by Google, and several of the search and advertising giant’s engineers developed All for Good as a 20-percent project (as widely known, Google lets engineers spend a day a week on projects that interest them).

In the spirit of openness, All for Good is completely open source and lets people log in with a slew of digital identity providers, including Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, Yahoo and OpenID. The service also comes with an extensive API that makes it possible for third-party developers to create applications based on data generated by the All for Good community.

(Via Ostatic)

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.

Carlson, an MSNBC campaign correspondent who is famous for his conservative spin and love for bowties, denies that the site will be a forum to discuss the future of the Republican party. Regardless of the spin, political news sites are aplenty and Carlson’s site will face stiff competition from HuffPo, the Politico and AOL’s new politics site, Politics Daily. Fellow MSNBC reporter Carlos Watson recently launched The Stimulist, which is focused on reporting long-form news for the Obama generation.

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. Remember, this is just a proxy for Twitter activity, as it only estimates visits to the site, and does not take into account all of the other clients and sites where people consume their Twitter feeds.

If Twitter is taking a breather, the HuffingtonPost is winded. The political uber-blog saw a 20 percent decline in unique U.S. visitors from October to November. U.S unique visitors went from 5 million to 4 million, according to comScore. And U.S. pageviews are down 33 percent to 43 million. (Yeah, we saw this coming). Meanwhile, CNN.com was able to build on its election momentum and broader news coverage to grow its U.S. audience 11.4 percent month-over-month to 27.4 million (although pageviews are down 14 percent).

Good thing HuffingtonPost raised $25 million before the numbers turned south. Now it has to readjust to the post-election environment and broaden its coverage as well.

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’. Rafat Ali recently pegged a similar valuation.

The new capital will serve for recruitment as well as the expansion of The Huffington Post’s offerings into other areas like ‘business, green/clean-tech and investigative news’. They also leave the door open for ‘select and focused acquisitions’. Oak Investment Partners has a relevant investment track record, having funded companies like Federated Media (TechCrunch’s advertising partner), Demand Media, MobiTV, Oberon Media and others in the past.

In an interview with BoomTown, Oak’s Fred Harman said:

There is an inevitable shift from offline to online with people increasingly getting their news media online, and this election proved how powerful the Huffington Post could be. And I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site.

Harman, who will be joining The HuffPo’s board, also added:

The cycle of print media is accelerating downward and there are not as many companies with a balance sheet and focus to do it right online. The news market is really up for grabs in a lot of ways … and it is a good time for those who are viewed as authoritative.

Comscore’s traffic report of the blogging network seems to reflect that The Huffington Post is in fact doing something right.

Update: here’s the full press release:

The Huffington Post Announces $25 Million In Funding From Oak Investment Partners

Harman joins The Huffington Post board of directors, whose members include: Eric Hippeau, Managing Partner of Softbank Capital, Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Betsy Morgan.

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 (see chart below). 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?

This should be fun to watch.

Can you say IPO?