Arianna: No Regrets on AOL Deal Anniversary

Media maven Arianna Huffington, reflecting on the year since the Huffington Post was bought by AOL, sounds as if she has no regrets.

Image: Photo Illustration by Sean Driscoll

Remember the post-Super Bowl game deal that had AOL buying The Huffington Post for $315 million last year? Well, the editorial force behind the latter, Arianna Huffington, says that she has no regrets about the media marriage one year later.

In a nearly 2,000-word piece that ran Thursday (apparently no one edits down HuffPo’s chief editor), Huffington talks about numbers —including impressions that went up way more than she expected—and the site's plans for the year ahead.

Naturally, she fails to mention the controversies over the last year, and there were plenty, such as the unpaid blogger brouhaha after the AOL deal or the sparring with TechCrunch founder, the departed Michael Arrington, over conflict of interest issues when he started a venture capital fund.

What she did have to say about HuffPo:

• Since the merger, the site has launched 44 new verticals, added 170 new editors and reporters and 9,884 new bloggers. There are now three international editions, in Canada, the United Kingdom and France, and new editions on the way with versions for Quebec, Spain and Italy added within the next three months.
• Unique visitors a month have reached 36.2 million (an increase of 47 percent).
• HuffPo has been home to 54 million comments posted in 2011 and received 1.2 billion page views in December 2011 alone, buoyed in part by 21.6 million social referrals.

Huffington stresses the importance of making the site interactive—but not too interactive, with resources spent trying to tamp down the toxicity.

We've committed a lot of resources (both in terms of state-of-the-art technology and a dedicated team of moderators) to pre-moderating comments in order to foster a non-toxic atmosphere where people can let their voices be heard and often disagree -- passionately but civilly. As a result, we've been rewarded with one of the most active communities on the web, and over 130 million comments since we launched.

What's next at HuffPo? Apparently, a new project called the HuffPost Streaming Network, that launches this summer and will be available on computers, smartphones, tablets and TV. It will live stream video 24/7, “using the HuffPost universe—the stories, editors, reporters, bloggers, and community—as its real-time script,” with 12 hours of original programming, five days a week.