The Economics of Blogging and The Huffington Post. When The Huffington Post announced earlier this week that it was being acquired by AOL for $315 million in cash and stock, one group felt slighted: a set of unpaid bloggers for the site, identifying by the Twitter hashtag #huffpuff, which claims that The Huffington Post has “built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists.”
Some analyses in the mainstream media have echoed these sentiments. “To grasp The Huffington Post’s business model,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Tim Rutten, “picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.” I have enormous sympathy for anyone writing about public affairs, whether as a hobby or as a career. And I’d encourage people to think very carefully about where they are doing their writing, and what they are getting paid for it.
The fact is, however, that sentiments like Mr. The Huffington Post receives huge amounts of traffic: about 15.6 million page views per weekday, according to Quantcast. Mment is free. AOL and Huffington Post merger: Search engine optimization won't work forever. - By Farhad Manjoo. Are you wondering, "will AOL's acquisition of the Huffington Post be successful? " I bet you are, as that's been a common search engine query since the announcement earlier this week that AOL will buy the Huffington Post. Other ways you might phrase the question include, "AOL Huffington Post will work? " or "AOL and Arianna good idea? " But some people can't spell, so it's likely that a few are searching for things like, "AOL do I need dial-up to read HyffPo now?
" or "Ariana Hiffington evil genius or just evil? " Well, any way you search for it, you're in luck, because you've arrived at the best page on the Web to tell you all you need to know about AOL acquiring the Huffington Post—or should I say, AOL acquiring HuffPo. Or, that is to say, AOL buying HuffPo. Farhad Manjoo is a technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of True Enough. Follow See what I did there? I don't blame Armstrong or Huffington for pursuing this strategy. But Google's weaknesses aren't permanent. Why the NYT will lose to HuffPo | Analysis & Opinion |
Tom McGeveran asks an important question, in his analysis of the AOL-HuffPo deal: What is it about the environment of traditional journalism that makes it so that readers are more likely to interact with the Huffington Post reblog of a New York Times article than they are with the article itself? The answer to this question, I think, is also a key part of the reason why the NYT paywall is a bad idea. It’s worth using a specific example here, so let’s take Dave Pell’s suggestion and look at the NYT’s Olbermann scoop last night, and HuffPo’s reblog of it. When Pell first tweeted the comparison, the NYT blog had no comments, while the HuffPo blog had “hundreds of comments/likes.” The NYT, by contrast, keeps such numbers to itself: you can see the number of posted comments, but you can’t see the number of comments which have been submitted and have yet to make it through moderation. Both the NYT and HufPo stories are blog posts, but there the similarities end.
HuffPost Social News. Huffington Post Thanks Facebook For Massive Growth. Earlier this year, the Huffington Post announced the launch of Huffington Post Social News, a service which aggregates Huffington Post content that Facebook users comment on and share. In an interview with PaidContent‘s Staci Kramer, the company provided details about traffic and engagement since the launch of Facebook Connect. The results were nothing short of spectacular. Facebook referral traffic is up 48 percent since the launch – and the already-heavy volume of comments jumped to 2.2 million from 1.7 million in July. Fifteen percent of HuffPo comments now come from Facebook. The Social News area of Huffington Post is one of the most robust implementations of Facebook Connect within a news site and it has apparently paid off.
While much of that growth is uncontrollable, making it easier for site visitors to share information within Facebook is a great way to boost the number of referrals.