Community Corner

Patch Parent Company Purchases Huffington Post

AOL, the parent company of Patch, has acquired blog site, The Huffington Post.

If you haven't heard, AOL, the parent company of Patch, has acquired blog site, The Huffington Post.

AOL's CEO, Tim Armstrong, sent an e-mail to AOL employees Sunday describing the $315 million deal, as reported by The New York Times:

"Today we are announcing that we have agreed to acquire The Huffington Post, one of the most exciting, influential, and fastest growing properties on the Internet," he wrote. " We believe in brands, quality journalism, and the positive role of communities in the world—The Huffington Post shares our values and the combination of the two companies will create the premier global and local media company on the Internet."

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"In the local area," he added, "the combination of the two companies will create a scaled connection between global and local communities on one platform.  This will create a new way for people to get local and global information in a timely and entertaining way."

Here is some information that puts the deal into perspective:

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·      Together, AOL and The Huffington Post will have 117 million unduplicated domestic monthly UVs, and 270 million monthly UVs worldwide (according to comScore Dec 2010).

·      The Huffington Post is one of the fastest growing web properties on the Internet.  It grew 22 percent last year – that’s faster than Twitter, which grew 18 percent - and 15 times as quickly as the Internet grew last year (comScore Dec ’09-’10).

·      AOL passed Hulu in unique viewers on video in the fourth quarter of 2010; video views on AOL are up 400 percent year-over-year.

·     AOL owns several dozen Internet properties, including popular sites and services and MapQuest, Fanhouse, and Moviefone, and of course AOL Mail and AIM.

The founder and namesake of Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington, will head the AOL's new The Huffington Post Media Group. This group will include AOL Media, AOL Local & Mapping, AOL Search and The Huffington Post. 

It's too early to say what this means to Bellevue Patch, but the editors of the 800 or so Patch sites across the country, myself included, are staying put. We still have big ambitions to bring more users to the site and make it one of the most popular in the region.


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