Huffington Post

Huffington Post

The Huffington Post

Abstract

This paper discusses the growing success of The Huffington Post. The online publisher has become a prominent online news source over the years and this paper examines the success, while relating The Huffington Post’s strategy to common marketing analysis tools such as the Porter Five Force Analysis, as well as discussing four different revenue models for online publishers.

The Huffington Post
In May 2005, the Huffington Post was founded by political activist Arianna Huffington, former AOL executive Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti. The site focuses on political and cultural events and is supported by a large number of bloggers. The website is free to users and generates revenue through advertisements. Many different celebrities and politicians contribute to The Huffington Post, such as John Cusack, Bill Richardson, and John Kerry. Arianna Huffington is the editor in chief of The Huffington Post and is also a frequent blogger on the website.
While the site has thousands of posts with original content, it also borrows and reposts articles from other outlets in order to drive traffic. In fact, The Huffington Post was one of the first news sites to act as a aggregator for its readers by pulling articles from other publishers to one central website (Sarno, 2011). The site has content sharing partnerships with content providers such as People, Rolling Stone and Yahoo, among many others. In 2011, The Huffington Post agreed to be purchased by AOL Inc. in a $315 million deal that joined the content of both websites together, in what is now called the Huffington Post Media Group (Sarno, 2011). Arianna Huffington serves as president and editor in chief of the new venture.
Since the acquisition The Huffington Post has expanded into new countries, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Japan and Germany. In 2012, The Huffington Post was awarded its first Pulitzer Prize and also released a weekly digital...

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