Liberal-focused The Huffington Post and social network Facebook.com have partnered on a new website called the HuffPost Social News. HuffPost Social News aggregates Huffington Post news stories that are being discussed through Facebook.
These stories include links on The Huffington Post that is being commented on in Facebook. Stories that are shared by users are also mentioned on the HuffPost Social News website. This concept is similar to TimesPeople, a social network that The New York Times launched last year.
“Our goal is to make HuffPost Social News the go-to place for Facebook users to share news–both the stories they love and the stories they hate–with friends,” stated Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. “It should also appeal to marketers interested in reaching passionate, savvy readers who care about the news and who want to share their interests with friends.”
Political blog The Huffington Post has named Eric Hippeau as the new CEO. Hippeau was involved on the board of directors at The Huffington Post after SoftBank made an investment in the company. Hippeau will be replacing Betsy Morgan as she is leaving the company.
Hippeau had worked at media companies over the last 25 years. From 1993 to 2000, Hippeau was the CEO of Ziff Davis. Hippeau is also on the board of directors for Yahoo!, Buzz Media, BuzzFeed, Thumbplay, and Associated Content.
Conservative media personality Tucker Carlson is very well known for being called out by Jon Stewart on former CNN show Crossfire. Carlson is now planning to launch a news website that competes directly to The Huffington Post. Carlson plans to launch a website called TheDailyCaller.com, but more from a conservative news angle.
Carlson claims that his website will focus on “telling the truth and be accurate.” The journalists on TheDailyCaller.com will share in the profits. The motto of TheDailyCaller is “every seven minutes” because Carlson claims that breaking news will happen a lot faster than The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report.
Personally I’m not much of a fan of Tucker Carlson because of the attitude he had during the program below. I’m a big fan of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. I believe that maintaining humor in the serious world of politics is a great mix to have. Questioning Comedy Central’s credibility as a defensive strategy did not seem to give Carlson much merit. And in terms of being able to compete with The Drudge Report, I think that may be a joke because Drudge is already very established and has a massive audience.
Over the weekend, The Huffington Post (HuffPo) reported that they will be hiring a group of investigative journalists to report about the economy exclusively. HuffPo is working with The Atlantic Philanthropies and several other donors to launch the Huffington Post Investigative Fund with a budget of about $1.75 million.
That is enough for Huffington to hire about 10 staff journalists to focus on the economy. The work provided by these journalists will also be available for any publication that wants to syndicate it. “All of us increasingly have to look at different ways to save investigative journalism,” stated Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the website.
Even though HuffPo skews to be more liberal, they said that the newly formed economy-focused aspect of the website will be nonpartisan.
According to a source with BusinessInsider, The Huffington Post is interested in acquiring Deadline Hollywood Daily. DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com started a couple of years ago and has built themselves to about 25,000 on Alexa. No deal has been made yet, but rumor has it that the company is shopping around.
Nikki Finke, founder of DHD met with several people to sell their website in the past. Rumor has it that Nikki met with paidContent and Variety. The Huffington Post recently raised $25 million from Oak Investment Partners so they have money to focus on acquisitions. HuffPo acquired 236.com several months ago.
Sharon Waxman of TheWrap.com revealed that Nikki said she has a couple of other offers on the table. Waxman pegged the deal to be worth around $400,000-$500,000 based on the website’s unique visitors. Waxman also said that Charlie Koones, a former publisher at Variety made a $500K offer.
The Huffington Post raised about $25 million in funding at the beginning of December. As you may recall, HuffPo had a record breaking amount of traffic during election season. Now they are getting into the acquisition game by buying out 236.com (known as 23/6). 236.com is a comedy website that was created in November 2007 as a partnership between Huffington Post and InterActiveCorp.
This acquisition indicates that The Huffington Post wants to seek other avenues of potential revenue and not just straight commentary. 236.com receives roughly 2 million unique visitors per month. HuffPo gets about 16 million. Through the acquisition, content made for 23/6 will be added to a comedy section of The Huffington Post.
“After a successful first year as a standalone comedy site we are excited to bring 236 into The Huffington Post as we launch our comedy vertical,” stated Arianna Huffington, co-founder of Huffington Post. “We look forward to creating a section that serves not only as a one-stop-shop for humor with a satirical take on the news but a spirited community for all comedy lovers.”
Yesterday The Wall Street Journal published an article about how Democrats are winning in the polls and online. As a matter of fact, the traffic of liberal political blog, HuffingtonPost.com (HuffPo) has skyrocketed. Their traffic numbers have quadrupled since last year. As of September 2008, HuffPo received 4.5 million uniques per month. Drudgereport.com, the conservative blog had 2 million uniques.
Below is an image I pulled from The WSJ, collected from comScore:
As of September of last year, drudgereport.com had about 1.2 million and HuffPo had 792,000 uniques. Talkingpointsmemo.com had gone from 32,000 uniques to 458,000 uniques over the last year. Talking Points Memo started around 2000 during the Florida vote recount process. Conservative blog, RedState.com jumped from 38,000 uniques last year to 235,000 uniques this year.
Another trend that is easy to notice is that HuffPo seems to be dominating the Digg homepage these days. In the last 2 days, HuffPo had over 11 articles hit the Digg homepage. Check out the screenshot below of the last 8 stories:
I did a similar search query for the DrudgeReport.com and the last time they had reached the Digg homepage was 94 days ago. That right there tells you something about why they are dropping in traffic.
This also tells you something about Digg too. Digg users tend to prefer reading a liberal bias view during the course of this election. There is a direct correlation between Huffington Post traffic soaring and the sudden popularity of Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin. This will become even more apparent after the conclusion of the voting process on November 4.
