The Huffington Post will soon turn five years old — veritable old-age in Internet years.
As the Web site, co-founded by Greek-born media maven Arianna Huffington and launched on May 9, 2005, marks the anniversary, its proclaimed mission to be an “Internet newspaper” gains more credence every time its traffic surpasses the Web sites of its print brethren.
It recently made the top 10 current events and global news sites, with 13 million unique users in March, an increase of more than 94 percent over the year before, according to Nielsen Online.
If the trend continues, the Huffington Post could soon pass the New York Times’ Web site (16.6 million unique users in March) in traffic this year.
The growth is a remarkable feat for a site launched as little more than a collection of celebrity bloggers, a liberal rival to the Drudge Report, a conservative Internet pioneer.
Since then, HuffPo, as it is known, has developed 20 sections ranging from food to books, launched four city-specific pages and integrated itself with social networks, partnering with Facebook and Twitter.
Ken Lerer, chairman and co-founder, said he recently looked up the Huffington Post from 2005 on www.archive.org.
“I was floored,” he said. “It seemed really boring, very clean. It was great, but there wasn’t a lot there compared to where we are now.”
Now, the breadth of the Huffington Post — combining work from a paid staff of 70 reporters and editors, some 6,000 bloggers writing for free and content from the Associated Press (a paying member) and other media companies — is considerably greater.
It’s a low-cost, high-content formula that has proven exceptionally efficient at attracting readers, though it hasn’t yet achieved profitability through advertising, which Lerer says is robust this year.
“I’m completely sure the site will be profitable by the end of the year,” Huffington said. “It would have been profitable a lot sooner if we hadn’t kept growing.”
Maturing from primarily a political news site to a general interest destination is an interesting proposition in an online world where success has often meant focusing on niche markets. In some ways, HuffPo is beginning to resemble an old-fashioned newspaper.
“Huffington Post is still saying: ‘What people still like is everything — or a lot — in one place,’” said Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics: Twelve new trends that will shape the news you get. “It’s the same principle [of a newspaper]. It’s just some different content and it’s organized different. The irony is just too rich.”
Becoming all things to all people, though, could be difficult for a site typically seen as left-leaning. Huffington, who is also editor-in-chief, disputes that image, citing the site’s reporting on the war in Afghanistan and on the public option in the US healthcare debates.
“We don’t have any ideological alignment with either political party,” she said. “We have been very critical of both political parties at different times. Our alignment is with what we consider to be in the interests of the public.”
Though some sites are adopting or considering pay walls, the Huffington Post has thoroughly embraced Web culture.
“Those who still can’t believe: ‘Why are people updating their Facebook profiles for free? Why are they editing Wikipedia entries for free? Why are they blogging on the Huffington Post for free?’ — the truth is that many people want to do that as part of their own self-expression. Nobody asks why are people watching bad TV for seven hours a day,” Huffington said.
“They understand the multiplier effect on the Web — how you can generate and multiply traffic by using the vitality of the Web,” Doctor said. “Clearly, they got more than they ever bargained for when Arianna Huffington got together with some other people and put the site together. That brand rode the Obama wave and now I think it’s really running the post-Obama wave in terms of a congenial site for people of the left or progressive political affiliation.”
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