Huffington Post, AOL, And Why You Shouldn’t Write For Free
by J. Danielle
When Huffington Post founder Ariana Huffington and execs at AOL announced that AOL would be buying Huffington Post for $315 million dollars a lot of people were surprised. In the media world, people wondered if this was a good investment for the Grandaddy of the internet, and whether HuffPo would lose its original appeal of being disassociated with media giants.
To address those two issues, in my opinion, this is a great deal for AOL, and HuffPo has been connected to large media industry for at least the past 2 years if not more. The change to HuffPo’s original “value” was made a long time ago when Huffington decided to expand her core set of leftist writers beyond an original hand-selected few. From there HuffPo became a breaking news and tabloid paper no different from TMZ or any other scandal-driven site.
The reason this is a good deal for AOL is because 75-80% of AOL’s current profits come from people who have had AOL mail for a long time and believe that they still need to pay AOL $25 a month to continue to be able to access it. For many subscribers, that’s $25 a month on top of whatever they’re paying to their internet service provider—Comcast, Time warner etc.
Unfortunately, relying on customer ignorance isn’t really a failsafe plan, and HuffPo provides a pretty cutting edge route into the future—free aggregate content distributed through multiple channels, high click rates, and aggressive pursuit of ad dollars. As you can see, there’s every reason to believe their business strategy will still rely on ignorance, just contributors instead of customers.
What the hell am I talking about? I’m happy to explain.
Read the Full Essay @ Media Strut
by J. Danielle
When Huffington Post founder Ariana Huffington and execs at AOL announced that AOL would be buying Huffington Post for $315 million dollars a lot of people were surprised. In the media world, people wondered if this was a good investment for the Grandaddy of the internet, and whether HuffPo would lose its original appeal of being disassociated with media giants.
To address those two issues, in my opinion, this is a great deal for AOL, and HuffPo has been connected to large media industry for at least the past 2 years if not more. The change to HuffPo’s original “value” was made a long time ago when Huffington decided to expand her core set of leftist writers beyond an original hand-selected few. From there HuffPo became a breaking news and tabloid paper no different from TMZ or any other scandal-driven site.
The reason this is a good deal for AOL is because 75-80% of AOL’s current profits come from people who have had AOL mail for a long time and believe that they still need to pay AOL $25 a month to continue to be able to access it. For many subscribers, that’s $25 a month on top of whatever they’re paying to their internet service provider—Comcast, Time warner etc.
Unfortunately, relying on customer ignorance isn’t really a failsafe plan, and HuffPo provides a pretty cutting edge route into the future—free aggregate content distributed through multiple channels, high click rates, and aggressive pursuit of ad dollars. As you can see, there’s every reason to believe their business strategy will still rely on ignorance, just contributors instead of customers.
What the hell am I talking about? I’m happy to explain.
Read the Full Essay @ Media Strut
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