What Will New CRO Greg Coleman Bring to the Huffington Post?

Yesterday, the Huffington Post announced it was hiring Greg Coleman as its new president and chief revenue officer. Coleman had been previously been Yahoo!'s executive vice president of global sales where, according to the Huffington Post's Jerry Weinstein he helped grow the search engine's ad sales from $500 million to "nearly $7 billion" in seven years. (Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson has slightly different numbers, pinning Yahoo!'s growth under Coleman as "from $600 million to $6 billion," but, hey, what's a few hundred million between friends, right?) Coleman also did a stint at AOL, where (again, per Carlson) he was known for his "gold-plated rolodex."

Coleman's task at HP will be to grow the sales team and work on direct sales, an area Business Insider's Carlson calls "relatively new" for the site in an interview he did with Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. In the same interview, Hippeau teases "some very innovative programs for advertisers to interact with users," but doesn't elaborate.

What sort of interaction Huffington Post users are hoping for from advertisers is hard to imagine. The site already features ads integrated in its content areas (with easy-to-miss "Advertisement" tags) that allow comments. And that's not including the content that is essentially advertising for (usually unpaid) writers promoting their books or outside projects within HP's editorial space.

Coleman told the Wall Street Journal's Ty McMahan that HP is "one of the fastest-growing sites on the Internet, and I look at that as something where the connection between the user and the marketing community is a fantastic opportunity.”

It's certainly growing in terms of investments. McMahan goes on to point out that it raised $35 million from Greycroft Partners, Softbank Capital Partners, and Oak Investment Partners this year. Last year the New York Times' Brian Stelter raised the hackles of many Web business observers when he quoted "one person who was briefed on discussions" about the site's value as putting its worth in the neighborhood of $200 million. ("That would put the price at more than $50 for each visitor, a high valuation," Stelter noted dryly.) Advertising Age's Simon Dumenco called that valuation "cracked-out," and expressed shock that it "actually gained currency, though anybody with basic math skills and a halfway-decent bullshit detector knew the figure was nonsense." Wired's Epicenter blogger Betsy Schiffman called the figure "jaw-dropping 1999ish" but said, "when you look at recent web deals, $200 million, or $50 per visitor, actually only sounds mildly crazy."

As far as the Huffington Post's revenue, Carlson (citing CEO Hippeau) says the privately-held company earned $15 million in 2009. He also reports the site received 23 million unique visitors last month based on its internal numbers. (All Things Digital's Boomtown blogger Kara Swisher says the numbers are closer to 8.9 million per Nielsen Online.)

Coleman starts his new job September 28. It stands to be seen if he can make the site truly worth that inflated $200 million figure—or, hold onto your hat, more. If Steven Brill's Journalism Online, News Corp.'s Mosaic, or any other subscription-only and/or micropayment plan for content does come to pass on the Web in the next few months, the site will lose much of its aggregated content. Sure, it has a very high volume of original blog posts (which, again, is produced mostly for free), but will those posts be valuable enough to sell ads—especially "very innovative" ones?

We'll see.