That's according to Arianna Huffington herself (left), who in her column yesterday mentioned in passing: "The night before Obama is sworn in, HuffPost is co-hosting a pre-Inaugural ball at the Newseum in Washington."Way to go, host-with-the-mo$t, Charles Overby! You snagged that high-profile media star on one of Washington's most historic occasions, two weeks from today. (You and Arianna no doubt will enjoy a lively debate about federal open-records laws and the for-profit prison industry -- a subject of more than passing interest to you and yours, to be sure!)
I can't imagine a more of-the-moment mogul than the proprietress of The Huffington Post. Huffington last year reeled in yet more venture-capital funding, spurring some jaw-dropping valuations for what she's now calling The Internet Newspaper.
The Huffington Post is a fraud. It's simply a collection of articles written almost entirely by other newspapers. She sprinkles in a smattering of superficial commentary from her celeb and non-celeb friends and calls it an "Internet Newspaper." I'm amazed she hasn't been sued yet for copyright infringement.
ReplyDeleteHere's an interesting commentary from a columnist at Advertising Age about the Huffington Post's alleged valuation of $200 million:
by Simon Dumenco
Published: January 05, 2009
What if the privately held Huffington Post is worth not $200 million -- a cracked-out number floated last year -- or even $100 million, but, say, $2 mil?
This is not entirely an academic question, given that in December HuffPo astonished media watchers by securing $25 million in additional funding from Oak Investment Partners, a Palo Alto, Calif., venture-capital firm. The timing was particularly amazing, given that the lefty uber-blog's traffic has lately been plummeting -- a possibility my colleague Nat Ives examined way back in October. At the time Arianna Huffington insisted to Nat that the "Huffington Post is no longer as dependent on politics," and so she wasn't particular worried about the usual post-election readership swoon of politically-focused publications.
Arianna Huffington
That $200 million figure first appeared in a Brian Stelter piece in The New York Times last spring. "According to one person who was briefed on discussions but was not permitted to speak for attribution," Stelter wrote, "the company has at least looked at the value of the site if it were put up for sale, and a figure around $200 million was used."
Amazingly, that number actually gained currency, though anybody with basic math skills and a halfway-decent bullshit detector knew the figure was nonsense, even before the economy melted down. Consider, for starters, HuffPo's revenue. As Nat reported, from January through August of last year -- the site's most-trafficked year -- "the site collected just $302,000 in ad revenue, according to an estimate from TNS Media Intelligence."
Still, there's a residual assumption that HuffPo must be worth at least tens of millions, especially given Oak's $25 mil investment for an undisclosed stake. Just after December's Oak round, for instance, The Wall Street Journal's "BoomTown" blogger Kara Swisher quoted an unnamed source who put HuffPo's valuation just "south of $100 million." Clearly those Palo Alto VCs are hoping that the blog's expansion plans -- last summer's launch of a Chicago HuffPo edition, for instance -- will some day pay off.
So how'd I come up with my $2 million figure? Well, let me start by saying that I'm not an unnamed source, and I do tend to allow myself to speak for attribution, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt. OK, basically all I did was look at HuffPo's competition, in particular a similarly left-leaning content site that's well-established -- in fact, IPO'd a decade ago. Back in 1999, you may remember,
Hed should read "snares"?
ReplyDelete10:16 pm: Thanks! I wish I had more copy editors like you.
ReplyDeleteHuffington is a money-grubbing sweet-talker who's made money hand over fist without an original idea of her own.
ReplyDeleteShe ought to get along perfectly with the Newseum/FF folks.