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AOL & HuffPo: The Portal’s Last Gasp?

Written on
Feb 7, 2011 
Author
Gavin Dunaway  |
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AOL & HuffPo: The Portal’s Last Gasp?

skipping_smallOh, Arianna, how you woo… Now you’ve got AOL CEO Tim Armstrong eating out of your well-manicured hand.

Almost literally — according to her diary of the events leading to the merger of AOL and HuffingtonPost, Armstrong first brought it up when he came to her house for lunch — perhaps she won his stomach first. Reading the post, it sounds like the two are the bestest friends ever (“Tim and I have been saying over the last couple of weeks: 1 + 1 = 11.”) — I wonder if Mike Arrington is crying in a corner somewhere.

AOL has laid out $315 million, mainly in cash, for HuffPo and cofounder Huffington is now president and editor of the Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all AOL content. Strong AOL brands such as TechCrunch and MovieFone are likely to stay the same, Huffington said during a conference call, and she’s particularly fascinated by the possibilities of community news outlet Patch.

HuffPo will contribute $50 million to AOL’s $2.4 billion estimated revenue for 2011 and is expected to up that to $100 million. The press release says HuffPo has 25 million monthly uniques but Pace Lattin comments that Compete.com shows the traffic peaking at 13 million and that half the visitors bounce after reading a page.

It’s a smart move on AOL’s part — HuffPo is a contemporary portal with far better newsy content. Huffpo has a simple, effective layout and is easy to navigate. Despite being “politically charged” (You could call it the left wing’s New York Post, but as a vehement liberal, I don’t consider HuffPo all that left.), the site attracts big-name brand advertisers for display, video and sponsored content.

But how does the AOL Way, Armstrong’s content-generation manual, fit in with HuffPo? Well he says that method only applies to certain content…

It’s quite funny — the reason why HuffPo has been a success is that it has journalistic roots, editors who have a sense of newsworthiness rather than content engineers that follow a production format and game search engines. HuffPo is by no means high quality (although certain writers such as Dan Froomkin and Jason Linkins are top notch), but it is higher quality than most news aggregators.

As Buzz Machine’s Jeff Jarvis explains, “What HuffPo and Arianna bring is a new cultural understanding of media that is built around the value of curation, the power of peers, the link economy, passion as an asset, and celebrity as a currency.”

But is that enough to save content-based portals? Earlier in the piece Jarvis calls them “burned toast.”

I remember avoiding HuffPo when it first launched in 2005 because I didn’t want to read news with a liberal slant — call me crazy, I just wanted to read news. But HuffPo became my go-to place for insta-news, rather than Google News — HuffPo tends to do a better job of aggregating. Yes, I roll my eyes when I see celebrity swimwear pics on the front page, but generally the site offers a quick way to see what’s buzzing.

But more and more, I’ve been favoring another site for news aggregation — Twitter. On Twitter, I have customized feeds organized by topic, complete with my favorite content resources. Setting up such a system isn’t a whole lot of work, and now there’s little reason to visit Yahoo or AOL or HuffPo for updates.

HuffingtonPost may still be growing at a clip and joining forces with an older, established portal could pay off. But for how long? With social conquering the online world, do content-based portals really have much of a future?

Perhaps Arianna Huffington is AOL’s Obiwan Kenobi — its only hope. The force does seem strong in that one… I hate to spoil the original “Star Wars” trilogy, but he does die long before the end…





Reader Comments.

When referring to Arianna you must also mention her master’s name George Soros. This has nothing to do with merging HuffPO with AOL, but it has everything to do with Mr. Soros and his reach. Frankly this isn’t even worth mentioning since HuffPO is so insignificant as a media outlet.

Posted by RightWay | 4:58 pm on February 7, 2011.

I will agree with you on the fact that the Huffington Post is not of the extreme left variety, as say a Daily Kos. And, I do think it is sort odd that they feature a lot of celebrity stories, which, I guess you can say is sort of a liberal NY Post.

However, what always makes me shake my head in disgust is the hypocrisy of Ms. Huffington. First, she was conservative, for many, many years and then decided to switch teams.

What was the epiphany? I can speculate as to why. I think that she went to the left side of the isle – only because she saw a niche in the marketplace for her brand of liberalism.

Since most media outlets are liberal, she might have an easier time of getting face time for her books and opinions.

Bottom line, I think, she just wanted to cash in on being a “cheap populist”.

And her books like “Pigs At The Trough”, “How to Overthrow the Government”, and “Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream” are all designed to hit the class warfare button harder than a game of “wack a mole”.

Also, and this is what I hate about left wing pundits, (and right wingers alike) is that “what is good enough for thee, is not good enough for me” type of pontification. Here she is – decrying the corporate world, politicians, empathy for the masses, etc.

But now, she is going to merge with AOL and make millions. She is becoming what she said she hates – a bid media corporation.

I wonder how much of that income will be shared with the middle class or the poor? Will she be providing loans for those who have lost their houses? I really don’t think so. …

Good post………..Robert C – The Wholesale Guy

Posted by The Wholesale Guy | 10:54 pm on February 7, 2011.

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