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

Current position of The Huffington Post 
The Huffington Post currently has over 9,000 bloggers—from politicians and celebrities to 
academics and policy experts—who contribute on a wide range of topics. The Huffington 
Post has huge amounts of traffic about 25 million monthly visitors and about 15.6 million 
page views [er weekday in 2011, according to Quantcast (Quantcast, 2011). But it also has a 
huge amount of content accounting for those page views. It publishes roughly 100 original 
pieces per day — paid and unpaid — in its politics section alone. And politics coverage, 
according to Arianna Huffington, reflects only about 15% of the site’s traffic.

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Statistical, Ecosystems and Competitiveness Analysis of the Media and Content Industries 
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The site also has an active community, with about bloggers contributing to it regularly and 
over one million comments made on the site each month. 
By comparison, The New York Times' monthly online audience is approximately 40 million. 
As a private company, The Huffington Post hasn't officially released financial data. The New 
York Times reports an expected growth to gross $60m in 2011, compared to $31m in 2010. 
Arianna Huffington claimed that the site made a profit last year, without providing details. 
The company is said to aims for $100 million in 2012, (NYT) 
The site is appealing and user-friendly and each landing page is full of as much content as 
possible with images, related stories, or recommendations for further reading: "to make much 
content intuitively available for people who are interested in certain topics," according to 
founding editor Roy Sekoff in an interview in Editorsweblog (Heald, 2009). There is 
extensive "interconnectedness" between elements of the site, which both reduces the chances 
of readers missing things in the vast array of stories available, and makes the site more 
'sticky'. According to Sekoff, people like to blog for the site because of its engaged 
readership, the high response rate in the form of posted comments and the lack of 
commitment and deadlines. 
In 2011 The Huffington Post has approximately 200 employees, of which only a handful of 
journalists.
The Huffington Post has repeatedly been criticized over its aggregation practices, in which it 
rewrites aggregated content without sufficient acknowledgement and without clearly linking 
back to the original source (Henriksson, 2011). Other online news sources also use 
aggregation, but often do this by copying only the headlines and then directly linking to the 
original source, which is said to benefit the original source as it generates traffic to this site.
The Huffington Post has also been criticized of earning money over the backs of unpaid 
bloggers, and following the take over by AOL, a lawsuit was started to find compensation for 
the thousands of bloggers on the site (Peters J. W., 2011). In a discussion of the Huffington 
Post’s business model Nate Silver (Silver, 2012) shows however how most of the individual 
blogs only receive few readers and are thus not worth much if one would calculate the 
advertising revenues generated by these individual pages. Even the best read blogs on the site 
usually do not receive advertising revenues which could live up to print newspaper standards. 
The Huffington Post discontinued its own investigative reporting / non profit journalism staff 
in 2009, but these editors were absorbed by the Center for Public Integrity The Huffington 
Post Investigative Fund also gave $2 milllion to the center and promised to publish a number 
of articles and headlines on its site linking to publications of the Center for public Integrity 
(Holm, 2010).