12/24/2013

Despite AOL paying $315 million for Huffington Post 3 years ago, it has yet to earn a profit on the website

How much patience will AOL have with its left wing experience with Huffington Post?  From Yahoo News:
. . . When The Huffington Post was sold for $315 million nearly three years ago, Huffington told her new boss, AOL Inc Chief Executive Tim Armstrong, that they had to uphold the tradition she started when she launched the site in 2005 and personally selected sweaters for her handful of employees. 
By the time of the February 2011 takeover, The Huffington Post had 200 employees and was known as a leading source for left-leaning political news. . . . . 
With AOL's backing - it has injected tens of millions of dollars into the website - The Huffington Post has been able to do much more than give out cardigans every year. Its audience has more than tripled from 25 million people before the AOL deal to 84 million at the end of October, according to comScore data. It has branched out to cover lifestyle, entertainment, business and technology, mushrooming to 60 vertical sites from about 20. 
But The Huffington Post has yet to turn a profit for AOL, falling far short of Armstrong's projection at the time of the acquisition that the unit would post $66 million in operating profit in 2013 on $165 million in revenue. . . .
BTW, after analyzing Fox New's news coverage, here is Erik Wemple's take on the fluff that makes up MSNBC's shows.
The highlight of the MSNBC daytime programming on Friday, Dec. 13 concerned not relations with Iran, not the Republicans’ intra-party warfare, not the budget, but chickens. Afternoon host Tamron Hall did a segment on the trials of J.J. Hart, a 3-year-old autistic child in DeBary, Fla., who enjoys playing with chickens in his back yard. . . .
MSNBC’s daytime stuff brims with softness . . .
The March 2013 findings of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in March weren’t kind to MSNBC. A content analysis conducted by Pew determined that programming on the network — over a three-day sample — followed an embarrassing split of 85 percent commentary to 15 percent reporting. Competitors fared far better . . . .

Choose your explanation as to why MSNBC doesn’t seed more of its coverage with such reporting and scale back the volunteer lefty blather:
1) Volunteer lefty blather is cheap;
2) Volunteer lefty blather appeals to the base;
3) Volunteer lefty blather is cheap and appeals to the base;
4) Serious reporters don’t engage in cheap and indulgent lefty blather;
5) Serious reporters deliver too little differentiation with arch-competitor CNN. . . . 

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home