AOL buys Huffington Post

AOL is paying £190m for the Huffington Post – the ragbag collection of once Democrat-leaning blogs founded in 2005. The announcement – modestly titled "A Brand New Media Universe", with the strap line "A Merger of Visions" – was signed at the SuperBowl yesterday. The deal makes HuffPo boss Arianna Huffington president and …

[TeeCee]

OMFG!

"A Brand New Media Universe"

and

"A Merger of Visions"

Sounds like the hype might be worth the money. Shame about the content really.....

[Anonymous Coward]

1+1=10

surely?

[Wommit]

There are 10 typre of IT people

Those who can do binary and those who can't.

[rciafardone]

She is wrong unless...

Those are Strings, then 1 + 1 = 11 is totally correct. After all type was never stated.

[Wommit]

Re : rciafardone

No quotes or decimal point, so they're integers. Its the base that's missing.

[Vladimir Plouzhnikov]

Somebody, send her a calculator

Because 1 + 1 = 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Not when you're ready to

string them together or string them up just depending...

[The Indomitable Gall]

Oooh, lookie!

I thought Huffington was a moron, but she's clearly brighter than I thought. I don't know many people who can count in unary.

[Marvin the Martian]

But she also clearly knows interesting people.

I've never met anyone who actually survived "...stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet." So I'd like to read an interesting interview with such people.

[Anonymous Coward]

Great day for quacks

Huffington often publishes scam-selling quack doctors who claim to cure autism with detox diets. The Huffington Post's journalistic professionalism is nowhere near NYT, BBC, CBC, old WSJ, or Al Jazeera. It's up there with any of Murdoch's doofus rags, occasionally producing solid work.

The impact of granting wider audience and corporate funding to someone who believes disproven garbage about dental fillings poisoning you, and Splenda or aspartame giving you headaches and cancer is worrying. It's not so different from the climate change denial hacks or even the Creationists.

Thankfully, it's hard to imagine this acquisition impacting AOL's parabolic course, but in the meantime it may prove humiliating for political leftists who once again get lumped in with the either sleazy or gullible purveyors of new-age organic hippie woowoo bunkum.

[Aaron Em]

What political leftists?

You say that as though the Huffington Post could attract any in the first place, except to laugh at it.

[Wade Burchette]

Sad

I pity you if you think the NYT, BBC, CBC, or any modern news organization has any professionalism at all. They have long since sold their soul to sensationalism.

[Mike Flugennock]

re: great day for quacks

an Anonymous Coward sez on 02.07.11 at 10:38gmt:

"The Huffington Post's journalistic professionalism is nowhere near NYT, BBC, CBC, old WSJ, or Al Jazeera."

Huh. That isn't saying much. Oh, and quit insulting Al Jazeera by lumping them in with that other worthless-assed bunch.

[Anonymous Coward]

So mercury isn't a poison then?!

Since when? DO you know that "silver fillings" are 50% mercury?! There is a long history where the AMA condemned 'amalgamated silver/mercury fillings' because of the toxicity issues and the many dentists that were only interested in profit broke off and formed the ADA. Then they told everyone its 'perfectly safe' and went on to tell us that sodium fluoride is perfectly safe to drink, completely disregarding evidence of hormone disruption, brittle bones, cancers and so on. BTW these fillings are banned in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, THOSE places take care of their people.

If you want to educate yourself start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_amalgam_controversy

I see this as a total sellout. The Huffington Post has joined all the other media whores that report only what governments and big corporations want, or what makes them money.

REAL news hardly ever surfaces, except by mistake.

[DrXym]

I'd give up AC

Your precious bodily fluids clearly calcified a long time ago so I wouldn't worry about water fluoridation.

[BongoJoe]

Ratbag

I never heard of this organ so I followed the link to have a look.

I eventually found the text somewhere between the adverts. Two things spring to mind here; the writing is terrible and, secondly, if they are going to massacre the English language will they please stop using it and return it?

The last time I read such drivel was when the paperboy used to deliver the neighouring lass' Jackie by mistake.

The more I read of this newspaper the more I wonder about the media within the US.

[Mike Flugennock]

re: ratbag

BongoJoe sez on 02.07.11 at 10:38gmt:

"I never heard of this organ so I followed the link to have a look."

You're not missing much. It's a pretty damn' useless organ, kind of like the appendix.

[Richard Jukes]

eh?

What an over vaulation. $300m for a website that I havent really heard of before let alone used. They report nothing of any use and quite frankly I cannot see why anyone would spend $300m for a website that is probably not even turning a profit on the bandwidth to ad ratio - let alone one that cannot be monetized.

I bet the Huff Post blew their load when they heard AOL were chucking money away like this. Where does AOL get all this money from? Surely the pot must be empty by now?

[Destroy All Monsters]

...onto a supersonic jet!

"Social-climbing limousine faux-liberals" love taking supersonic jets.

[Flybert]

Supersonic ?

Without the Concorde .. the only supersonic jets are military , and from what I've heard, HuffPo types are somewhat anti-military .. subsonic jets spew out lots of CO2 as well .. thought HuffPo types weren't too happy with that either ..

anyway .. one pile of shit + one pile of shit = a bigger pile of shit

I know AOL wants to be a big content provider .. guess they didn't have the money to buy NBC .. so they went dumpster diving ..

[Anonymous Coward]

1+1 pile of shit

It could be 2 piles of shit, depending on where they land.

[copsewood]

Seen it all before

Yahoo bought Geocities for $3.57 billion in January 1999, mismanaged it and then switched it off in October 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities

[DrXym]

AOL have run plenty of viable opportunities into the ground

AOL are dab hands at this:

- Netscape. AOL had the chance to own their own browser engine rather than being slaves to their arch rival's engine. They took a payoff on a lawsuit and cut Mozilla loose. Netscape became a shell website and little else. Good for Mozilla I suppose, not so good for AOL.

- Nullsoft. AOL owned a potential iTunes store before iTunes even existed. Winamp was the king media player on Windows. AOL managed to drive the brains of Nullsoft out (over things like Gnutella) and bloated Winamp into irrelevance.

- Mapquest. Google Maps before Google Maps existed. Now also an irrelevance.

- Time Warner. The mother of all cockups. AOL & TW merged, promised "synergies" and promptly watched as > 70% off the AOLTW stock price peeled away. TW asked for a divorce

AOL has always been a very conservative company, extremely paranoid of innovation, terrified of increased support calls, and desperately clinging onto their subscriber base.

I guess someone at the org has worked out that they're bleeding customers so fast that the ISP business is going to self destruct and they need more revenue streams. This might explain why they're diversifying now. I suppose it's a smart move to diversify but if they could easily drive HuffPo straight into the ground like they've done before. Not that I would mourn it's passing. The political stuff is interesting, but the new age quackery is utterly disgraceful.

[Tim Jenkins]

ATA : CONNECT

"Where does AOL get all this money from?"

As they once had thirty million paying punters worldwide, I suspect it's from all those antique Direct Debits and automated card payments still forking out $19.99 every month for 33.6kbs worth of dialup....

[Anonymous Coward]

People who step off of fast-moving trains...

...usually get mashed to bits under the train wheels and leave a dirty streak a mile long.

[Pablo]

Unless...

they step onto a supersonic jet traveling at the same speed.

[Swoop]

1+1=10

Whoever downvoted the 1+1=10 posts was obviously totally oblivious to the IT angle!

[The Indomitable Gall]

They also downvoted...

They downvoted my unary post too.

Too many non-geeks commenting here these days, methinks.

[kevin biswas]

AOL still exist ?

I thought they folded long ago.

[disgruntled yank]

probably not enough

Ms. Huffington's resilience is such that even AOL's bad karma may not be able to bring her down for good.

[kain preacher]

@eh

I don't know were they get their money from bu they have bill boards up here saying that they are hiring . The bill boards says come and work for us before your boss does .

[Identity]

Regardless of content...

As a charter subscriber to AOL (the financial pages are pretty good and it makes a great spam trap), I rarely read their political coverage as it strikes me as right-wing propaganda a la Faux News. While HuffPo was originally deemed pro-Democratic and leftist, they've taken to going after Obama (and not without reason, IMHO), so I wonder what effect Ariana's tenure is going to have on AOL's political slant. BTW, AOL says they're currently neutral...

[Mike Flugennock]

re: regardless of content...

Identity sez on 02.07.11 at 14:38gmt:

"AOL says they're currently neutral..."

You mean "neutered", don't you?

[Mike Flugennock]

From crap to worse

Congrats, bloggers. You now get to write for free for one of the biggest media conglomerates on the planet.

Score: Arianna Huffington, 315 million; You, 0.

[Flugal]

Huffington

Erm, so the Huffington Post is actually a *real* journal?

I've come across it a few times and the standards were so poor I thought it was some kind of piss take.

Hope this proves to be a further nail in AOL's coffin.

[DirkGently]

1 + 1 = 1

If we're talking Boolean Algebra.

[NoneSuch]

AOL is...

...what Microsoft will soon be.

[Stevie]

Bah!

"One and one is ONE".

Medicine Head.

[Anonymous Coward]

Huffington Post's Revenue = $11M

Basically, AOL is paying a little more than x27 revenue. While that might seem high, Google's P/E ratio is a little over x23. Facebook valuation is around x25 revenue.

[Matt Bryant]

Erm, so what did AOL buy?

$315m for an URL? After all, whomever is visiting the site is doing so to read the blogs, are any of the bloggers on a salary? I'd be a bit miffed if someone else was making $1m off my musings and I wasn't going to see a dime, so $315m must be a bit of a shock to the people actually producing the content Ms Huffington has made a mint off! Be a shame if all the bloggers upped sticks and made off to another site where their labours would be under their own control.....

[John Smith 19]

Huffington Post "Democrat leaning"

Are you *sure* about that?

Only I recall Ms Huffington nee Stasinopolis (not to sure on spelling her family name. It's all Greek to me) being quite a fan of Dubya and his predecessors. I'd also heard her Senator husband had a bit of a rep for being (how should I put this delicately to not offend the delicate political sensibilities of American readers ) pig s**t thick.

They also seem to operate as a news aggregator. So it stiches stuff from other sources to produce something out of err something else.

[zen1]

Wow

In my opinion, here we have two entities that both score significantly high on the suck-o-meter (not the fun one, either). How does one adaquately score the hell spawn of the "thing" that results when they merge? Sum the two scores and come up with a even nastier rating, average the two premerger scores or simply scrap the existing unit of measure and start fresh?

[John Smith 19]

@zen1

It's a tricky one.

I think possibly looking at the market capitalization (# of shares x share price) at the time when AOL merged with Time Warner and then when they (de-merged? Dropped the Time Warner bit?) or before they bought BEBO might give an idea of the power of this company to destroy shareholder value.

Reverse Midas effect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure this is such a good move

Will HuffPo's usual blend of progressive bloggers like posting on behalf of the corporate "man"??

Not sure that this is such a great idea, AOL.

[Barry Rueger]

Trains and Planes

Considering that the U.S. train system is forty years behind more advanced nations' and that the last supersonic passenger jet was grounded a decade ago, I'd have to conclude that the HuffPo mistress will be the perfect person to run AOL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Meaning

Does AOL really stand for Arseholes On Line?

Just wondering...

[kain preacher]

No

Since it's an American company that would be Assholes on line .