Huffington Post Archive

Last night sure was interesting — everyone on Twitter was bitching about the Groupon ads, cheering for the Chrysler ad, and there was very little actual football chatter from what I could tell. Then at 9:01 Pacific time, the conversation on Twitter changed in the tech sector. Kara Swisher and the NYT posted that the Huffington Post was acquired by AOL. Congrats to everyone involved – looks like this was a very large acquisition for the content network that recently acquired a number of blogs and technology providers.

What I immediately thought was, “wow, this fits perfectly with the AOL Way where they want to generate massive pageviews with little work”. Last week I put a URL into my bookmarks for later usage on a story about content scraping. The URL was from a post on HuffPo about some topless photos of actress Olivia Wilde. Apparently Wilde did a shoot (she was covered) in FHM magazine. The reason the link was interesting to me is that FHM magazine goes after any outlet that posts their images online. So could the HuffingtonPost really have posted these images? NOPE! What do you get when you land on the page titled, “Olivia Wilde Goes TOPLESS In FHM France (PHOTOS)”? You get one tiny paragraph of content and a link to another website. But you also get thousands of pixels in other non-related “stuff”.

When you put something in parens (Photos, Video, etc.) in a story title, you expect that the thing is actually located within the post.

So what did AOL pay for when they acquired HuffingtonPost for $315 million? Did they get one of the biggest SEO plays out there? Today on the investor call, Ariana Huffington said something about how they create quality content at cost-effective prices. I am not a regular reader of the HuffingtonPost – mainly because every link I follow ends up being a scrape or a let down in quality or quantity of content.

I am certain that most of the content on HuffPo is probably of good length and quality — but is it these types of articles that drive the pageviews to let them create the other quality content?

Continue reading “Just What Did AOL Get for Their $315 Million?” »

Earlier today I provided commentary on the content scraping/stealing issue that has seen a lot of discussion over the past week. I thought it might be interesting on a Saturday night to take a look at the issue from another perspective. So tonight I bring to you the world premiere of "Scrape, Scrape, Scrape".

Last night at the NY Tech meeting, the companies who presented came back on stage for a 5-minute panel discussion. Below is a video of their advice for startups in NYC. The panelists included:

• AlleyCorp (Kevin Ryan, CEO)
• DailyCandy (Catherine Levene, COO)
• Etsy (Rob Kalin, CEO)
• Huffington Post (Betsy Morgan, CEO)
• IAC (Joey Levin, SVP/M&A)
• The Ladders (Marc Cenedella, CEO)
• Meetup (G.Whalin, CTO & M.Voskoboynikov, Lead)
• Mimeo (CEO Adam Slutsky)
• Thumbplay (VP/BD Chris Phenner)

Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan presented the news resource last night at the NY Tech meeting. Most of the content comes from over 1,600 free authors and the Huffington Post team is around 50 people. They showed off their slick analytics tool which allows their staff to monitor in real-time the traffic each story is receiving and edit the titles or content on-the-fly to increase readership.

Huffington Post Demo from allen stern on Vimeo.