Clash of the Titans: Arianna Huffington v. Tina Brown

Who's more powerful, darling? Tina Brown or Arianna Huffington? To judge from Forbes' ranking of The Most Influential Women in Media, Arianna is way ahead.

Huffington, head and namesake of her own ever-growing Web site, author, and free-floating cable talking head, landed at #12 on the list and Brown, The Daily Beast's founder, comes in at #25. Brown beat blogger Heather Armstrong at 26 but didn't quite edge out Campbell Brown. (For some perspective, Oprah Winfrey is #1.)

Watching the supposed rivalry between Huffington and Brown play out is something of a New York media parlor game: Apparently two women—each of whom has toiled in the media trenches on both sides of the Atlantic for decades and undergone numerous transformations, the most recent involving some form of Web content and news aggregation—can only be understood as engage in a cat fight.

Last year, The Times offered a joint profile of the two headlined Huffington and Brown: Paths Intertwine in the Blog Thicket. After laying out the women's friendship—Shared vacations! Advice!—Tim Arango wrote, "These days the two powerful women find themselves on opposite coasts running competing Web sites."

But do they really compete? A side-by-side search of the sites stats on Alexa shows Huffington's site trouncing Brown's in most categories (traffic, pageviews, etc.) other than in bounce percentage—or the portion of readers who hit the site and jump right out. Of course, Huffington's site is vastly bigger than Brown's and has been around for longer, so it's hardly a fair fight.

On the money front, The Huffington Post keeps getting new funding—$5 million here, $25 million there—and has been given a somewhat absurd valuation of $200 million. (If you intend to buy the company, set aside at least a few dollars to buy the world's biggest grain of salt first.) The Beast, on the other hand, has widely been reported to have $18 million in backing from Diller for its first three years.

Brown's site may be worth less, but she uses her money for something Arianna doesn't: writers. The Beast's contracts may not be the fairest in the world (according to a recent New York Observer report), but at least Brown pays her writers something, which is more than most of Huffington's non-employee writers get.