AOL Buys Huffington Post, Hopes Readers Will Follow
$315 Million Deal Buys Content And, Hopefully, Commenters
The Huffington Post claims 25 million unique visitors monthly. The combination will reach 117 million unique visitors in the United States and 270 million worldwide. Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL, Inc., calls this combination "a next-generation American media company."
AOL was a web portal a few years ago. The expansion of industry leader Google into new areas, including news, forced its competitors to reexamine their business models. Portals like AOL direct readers to other sites. The vision for the new business model was to become a content provider. Rather than build a content site from scratch, AOL has elected to purchase one of the largest independent sites. The portfolio of writing the Post provides strongly positions AOL in the portal to provider race.
AOL brings content to the merger, videos, local news, and content from areas such as entertainment that the Post normally does not cover. The Post brings political and economic news and commentary from some of the most respected names in the business, such as Laurie David, Howard Fineman and others. Gary Hart and Dennis Kucinich are on the Politics page.
This purchase validates other purchases of content providers in recent months. The current business strategy for a web portal company today and for the next several years will be adding content. The key will be retaining the best writers and attracting new writers, including those recognized as experts in their fields. The content will also have to be tied to attracting readers.
Are other content providers in the purchasing crosshairs of one of the big Internet portals? Hot Air, Pajamas Media and Helium are among the quality content sites that remain available. If these businesses and their competitors can continually attract better writing and more unique visitors, they will be very attractive to the portals. $315 million may not be the highest price paid as the battle for content heats up.
Published by Charles Simmins
Charles Simmins is a native Western New Yorker with nearly thirty years of experience at senior level accounting positions in non-profit and for profit organizations. He was a volunteer firefighter, and a vo... View profile
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2 Comments
Post a CommentYou're correct, but Salem is not a major Internet player. Their purchase provides them with a consistent content source for their newspapers, and other over the air media.
Hot Air was already acquired by Salem Communications (SALM) last year.