AOL’s $315 million buyout of the Huffington Post has to rank as one of the most recklessly extravagant dot-com deals in history, rivaling the Time-Warner/AOL merger in stupidity if not in dollar value. Not that that would stop a few hard-core fans from blogging the deal as though it were the Second Coming. Here’s what one of them, Jason Pollack, had to say, taking the prize for retch-inducing obsequiousness: “The Huffington Post has been dramatically ahead of the curve in modifying their site to fit with the latest social trends. Last night they were rewarded handsomely for their brilliance.” Yeah, sure. Handsomely. Three-hundred-and-fifteen-million bucks! Hell, give us a measly one million and in three years we’ll build you an online presence with an audience that will rival Huffington’s in size. And unlike Huffington, which only recently began to make any money at all, we could ramp up advertising revenues relatively quickly to pay for expansion, avoiding their mistakes and stealing their best clients. The talent to do this has never been cheaper. Having come from the newspaper business ourselves, we can attest that Pulitzer-winning reporters, some of them close personal friends, are a glut on the market. News editors we know have been looking for work for as long as seven years. And a few former managing editors have thrown in the towel. Need some celebrity-types to contribute regular think-pieces and commentary? No problem. Many will do it for nothing simply because, like TV actors who work for scale on Broadway, they are egomaniacs who crave the exposure.
What does it take to attract Huffington-size audience? In a word, sleaze. If you haven’t visited the site recently or used Google news to find the top stories of the hour, you might still think of Huffington as the premier outlet for news, tidbits and high-minded commentary designed to appeal to political liberals. In fact, under Arianna Huffington’s sensation-mongering stewardship, they have mutated into being a purveyor of whatever it takes to attract eyeballs. As of this moment, the top Huffington story featured on Google carries the headline “Hibernating Bear Chased Off With Country Music”. These stories are pumped out by the minute, each one calculated to make us look. And click. If there should be even the slightest development in the Lindsay Lohan shoplifting saga, Huffington will be among the first to pick up on it and exploit it. And if search-engine interest in the troubled actress’s latest legal problem should flag for even 15 minutes, don’t be surprised if Huffington replaces it with revealing photos of Lohan flashing her beaver as she emerges from a limo. That is exactly the kind of “news” with which Huffington has built its audience. And it is exactly what AOL is paying $315 million for, since Huffington barely exists in brick-and-mortar form, other than perhaps a few Herman Miller chairs for the handful of ad-takers and editorial employees who are calling the shots. Granted, it takes talented editors to successfully game search-engines with tabloid trash and titillating key words, and to maintain a stable of writing talent willing to work for peanuts. But are they worth $315 million?
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Huffington Post got it’s volume of viewers by riding the coattails of Obama’s election. It held onto them by making is content more graphic and social. I quit going there when the pop up ad java scripting started commercially infecting the site with Arianna’s blessing. The format is too gaudy and pandering. I now go to Max Keiser and Zero Hedge for my ‘news’. Both BO and AH are sellouts to the master economic class. The revolution will not be televised, the net is being sacrificed, ‘kill switched’, bought out, as we blog……..