Statistical, Ecosystems and Competitiveness Analysis of the Media and Content Industries: The Newspaper Publishing Industry

Business and revenue models 
The Huffington Post’s business model is based on low cost content production through 
aggregation and blogging, sophisticated tools to drive visitors to its site and income from 
display advertising.  
It does not pay those who volunteer to write blogs for it, but this content represents a small 
share of its traffic. Celebrities are allowed to post blogs on the site, and a number have opted 
to do so over the years. The site also publishes paid or curated content, including columns by 
specialists in a wide range of fields such as food, dental health, sex, education and politics. 
Unlike other left-leaning blogs The Huffington Post offers both news commentary and 
coverage. 

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The Newspaper Publishing Industry 
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Almost all of the site’s revenues come from display advertising. In 2010 they generated 
$30.1 
million revenues from roughly 4.8 billion page views, according to Quantcast data. That 
means the average page view was worth a little more than six-tenths of a cent, or that 1,000 
page views were worth about $6.25 (Silver, 2012). 
It generated its traffic through clever search engine optimization, extensive use of tools which 
encourage visitors to share its content through social networks, and intense hyperlinking to 
other articles and content. It also uses data on traffic and usage of its site to optimize the 
placement of content in categories, page composition, hyperlinking and content sharing tools. 
AOL's display advertising revenue grew for the first time in more than three years in the first 
three months of 2011, helped by the acquisitions of Huffington Post, TechCrunch and GoVira 
(www.corp.aol). 
The Huffington’s was first profitable in 2010. Its gross revenues are estimated at 31 million in 
2010 and 60 million in 2011 (Peters & Kopytoff, 2011).