Huffington Post enters online publishing business model derby

By Michael Fraase

Friday, 18 December 2009 02:15AM CST

Section: Publishing

Hung, drawn, and quarteredThe latest entry in the sustainable online publishing business model derby is Huffington Post with embedded commercial tweets and comments. Is it just me or is each new derby entry dumber than the last?

Nat Ives, writing for Ad Age, notes “The biggest question is whether marketers and the Huffington Post can execute the program without marring visitors’ experience reading and interacting with the site.” Ives goes on to state the obvious: that users will probably accept the new attempt to attract attention so long as the ads are clearly labeled as such.

Ives cites Greg Coleman, Huffington Post president and chief revenue officer, as saying “a health-care company sponsoring a Twitter page around health-care policy might post a paid Tweet ‘to bring to fore the facts’ but in a neutral way.” As if a healthcare company—any healthcare company—will bring actual facts to bear in healthcare reform policy. And in a neutral way? Hah. Coleman tells Ives that these really new ad products—along with third-party traffic research and hiring four senior sales executives—“should more than double revenue by next year and expand it more than six times during the next three years.”

Huffington Post’s traffic is down only a little since Obama’s election, but the site is focusing more and more on the nonpolitical. Ives reports that nonpolitical articles accounted for 82% of pageviews in November 2009.

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