AOL Buys Huffington Post (Mixed Emotions)

The blog post I was planning to write for today will have to wait until tomorrow so I can think out loud about AOL’s purchase of the Huffington Post.  First an admission: I used to check the Huffington Post a couple of times a day as a kind of guilty pleasure.  They just make it so damn easy to see both the key political headline of the day and then immediately afterward some completely gratuitous piece of entertainment news.  I am saying “used to” because I am not sure how long that will last in the new constellation.

This is clearly a good deal for Arianna Huffington who I am pretty sure owns a meaningful piece of the Huffington Post and it will further accelerate the HuffPo’s reach and put her in charge of an even broader portfolio of content.  It is also likely to be a very good deal for the early investors, in particular Ken Lerer who I believe did the seed round, but also for Greycroft and Softbank.  Maybe less so for OAK which invested $25 million at the end of 2008 (although a very nice IRR for sure).  This got done as an all cash deal so nobody has to bet on AOL stock.

While I am happy for the many NY-based investors and co-founders, I am a bit sad  to see this happen now.  I believe that the Huffington Post could have had a longer run as an independent company, with a potential of becoming the center of a new journalism universe.  While their aggregation-based model was upsetting to some, the Huffington Post did invest a fair bit in technology and created an interesting web based news experience that easily beat the pants off such endeavors as “The Daily” (apps break the web!).  With some more growth and some experimenting on the formula, the Huffington Post could have become a critical source of traffic and revenues for independents.

Instead, I am afraid that as part of AOL, the Huffington Post will become completely ensnared in the content farm approach to the web where fewer and fewer links go to the outside world.  After all, this is the company that wants to produce 50,000+ pieces of content every month with its own writers.  And the only way they could figure out how to work with someone like Techcrunch was to buy them.  So: time to look for another champion that will make the independent model work.  Come to think of it: Reddit has been on fire recently growing to 1 billion page views/month.

What A Day in Tech/Net News!

The frontpage of Techmeme is simply stunning at the moment.  So many important things happening:

• Google announcing an attempt to completely remake communication and joint document prodcution with Wave.  See “Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave” on the Google blog.
  
• Microsoft is trying to get back into the search game with Bing.  It definitely looks like an attempt at a differentiated offering as can be seen in the video promoting it (although launching via a video seems a bit lame).
  
• Hulu, which is offering some of the best TV via the web introduced a desktop application and forbids using it on anything other than a Personal Computer (time to connect a netbook to the TV).  This will further the trend of “households cutting the cord on cable” (also on the frontpage of Techmeme).
  
• The Boy Genius gets their hands on an actual Palm Pre and has some immediate grips about the keyboard but approves of the screen.  Still rooting for Palm and web standards on a device.
  
• The Time Warner Board approves the AOL spinoff ending the disastrous merger that marked the top of the Internet bubble.  The spinoff will likely mark the bottom for traditional media companies.
  
• GigaOM launches a subscription product, which I believe is a key revenue strategy for publications that can provide valuable insights for a targeted (business) audience.  At the same time, big newspaper publishers may be trying to collude on charging for content in what would be a doomed attempt to rescue their existing model.

And — almost forgot — Ballmer shows off the Zune HD (how did that item qualify among the rest of this incredible lineup?).  My head is spinning — which could of course also be because I stayed up until 2:20am local time in London catching up on all this news.