The Huffington Post has been sold to AOL for $315 million. According to this article, all but $15 million of the purchase price will be paid in cash.
When I last wrote about HuffPo, it was to refer to this Newsweek article from July 2010. The 5-year-old site – I remember the day it launched – at that point was barely profitable, on annual revenues of $30 million, despite the $34 million invested in the site, not to mention all of the free content, a lot of which came from its 6,000 unpaid bloggers.
Actually, I’m not quite sure what made the site worth $315 million, which works out to just under $13 per monthly unique visitor (using the stats from the article).
I long ago stopped visiting HuffPo – not even sure if my login still works – because I simply don’t like overly commercialized sites. Something – I don’t remember what, exactly – prompted me to remove them from my blogroll a long time ago, too. But not until after I had tried a group blog, The Women’s Post, whose name was based on that site.
I wish AOL and HuffPo a happy marriage. And if AOL wants to buy another blog, I’m sure there are plenty others out there willing to sell 😉
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
I can see the CPA has her calculator out now:
unique monthly visitors x $13 = one nice payoff
Yeah 😉
More importantly ever since AOL bought Huffpost the site hasn’t been working right. At least not for me.
Ha!
It isn’t worth $315 million which AOL will eventually discover.
Yeah, that’s what I think, too.
How did that AOL/Westinghouse thing work out?
I think the Huffington Post is a colossal waste of time and energy, too, and never quite understood its (relative) success. Then someone, in snarking about the purchase, labeled them an SEO operation. Ding. That’s exactly it.
I know a number of freelance writers who’ve written for AOL. AOL currently pays its writers. So now they’re all wondering if yet another source of revenue for writers is going to dry up now that AOL will have all that free content from HuffPo.
Still I am more jealous of Stephanie Meyer (creator of the Twilight series). This pales in comparison. Not that I wouldn’t want to be paid $315 million for my thoughts though.