The Inquisitr » Huffington Post

PubMatic Selected To Optimize Ad Revenue By The Huffington Post

Duncan Riley — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:58:49 +0000

8 October 2009 (Inquisitr Wire). – PubMatic (www.PubMatic.com), a global company that provides premium online publishers with a full service solution to manage and monetize non-guaranteed inventory, today announced that The Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com) will use its technology for ad revenue management and brand protection. PubMatic lifts publisher revenue by uniquely optimizing each ad impression in real-time sold through secondary ad channels such as ad networks and exchanges. PubMatic was selected by The Huffington Post as a partner after the site conducted a trial of PubMatic’s technology.

PubMatic benefits online publishers through:

-Increased Revenue: more revenue from ad networks and ad exchanges through the use of PubMatic’s Ad Price Prediction technology
- Brand Protection: managing channel conflict between The Huffington Post’s growing sales force and ad networks, and providing tools to manage advertiser blocklists, creative policies and immediately eliminate unwanted creative
- Management and Efficiency: streamlining ad operations processes with support for managing ad network relationships and an integrated reporting dashboard
”PubMatic is excited to bring our platform for publisher monetization to a leading online news brand such as The Huffington Post. Our strong track record of delivering improved monetization and management capabilities for the Internet’s top properties shows how we’ve been pioneers and innovators in optimizing ad revenue for premium online publishers,” said Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO of PubMatic.

“The Huffington Post looks forward to tapping PubMatic to help monetize its large audience,” said Eric Ashman, Chief Financial Officer of The Huffington Post. “PubMatic will help HuffPost use technology to automate and optimize our non-guaranteed inventory. This will help us strengthen our position in direct channel sales and deliver more comprehensive packages to advertisers.”
According to Nielsen Online, The Huffington Post is one of the fastest growing news sites and it is continuing to expand in other mediums such as mobile. PubMatic’s technology will enable The Huffington Post to expand its revenue optimization.

Huffington Post teams up with Facebook – talk about deja vu

Steven Hodson — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:31:24 +0000

Kara Swisher has news today that Huffington Post is going to be collaborating with Facebook to launch a new feature on Monday called “HuffPost Social News”. The idea is that readers will be able to create a personalized social networking type page within Huffington Post itself.

I would just like to note at this point that we posted about Facebook looking to become the HuffPost of your social media world yesterday in like of their purchase of Friendfeed. This was of course the result of a larger post by Chadwick Matlin at the Washington Post where he suggested the idea

Instead, I think this is about social aggregation. Facebook bought FriendFeed so it could become the Huffington Post of your social life.

So it is rather interesting to see this post by Kara that has Huffington Post being the one to start the process of melding news blog sites with social media networks.

“We are looking at HuffPost Social News like a ‘digital water cooler,’ because we see news going in that direction,” said Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief and Co-founder Arianna Huffington, in an interview with me this weekend. “We did this, because we are interested in real identities having real conversations about news.”

While the use of “social news” will be seen by some as simply a clever PR term, this kind of innovative deployment on the Huffington Post is actually a very big step for the site, especially as an opportunity to bind its readers to it more closely, presumably increasing engagement and traffic.

“This is a natural way to expand into the Facebook community and give users who desire to engage and comment with friends more privacy,” said Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, with whom I also spoke earlier today. “And, like a lot of other sites, we are trying to make our site more attractive to marketers who want to engage with engaged users.”

Through the use of Facebook Connect and a Social News module that would appear on every page of HuffPost your activity on the news site would be sent back through to your Facebook timeline. It would also find your Facebook friends that are also reading HuffPost. Below is an example of Kara’s Facebook Module on Huffington Post

images courtesy of Kara Swisher

Huffington Post gets new CEO, spins departure of old one

Duncan Riley — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:25:02 +0000

Huffington Post’s investors have seemingly undertaken a small coup d’état, dumping CEO Betsy Morgan in favor of Eric Hippeau of Softbank Capital.

On the surface at least, the change in leadership would appear to be amicable, at least as much as these things can be. The press release heaps praise on Morgan, but makes no attempt to explain why she was “leaving the company” or where she was headed next, a sure sign that the push was unexpected.

On paper, new CEO Eric Hippeau would appear to be well qualified for the position. As well as having been on The Huffington Post’s board for several years, he is a former CEO of Ziff-Davis, the then publisher of ZDNet. Morgan was formerly with CBS, the current owner of ZDNet.

Hippeau’s has an interesting challenge going for with The Huffington Post. The company is well cashed up, but likewise having risen to the top in terms of traffic they must develop new projects to drive new growth, never an easy task when you’re already near the top of your game. The Huffington Post’s foray into investigative journalism offers some promise, but the more interesting project is its foray into local news, a sector notable for the number of failed startups that couldn’t turn local news into a viable business.

(Image via AllThingsD)

Journalist whines while Huffington Posts tries to help

Duncan Riley — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:34:35 +0000

The $1.75 million Huffington Post investigative journalism fund is under attack by a journalist signed up by the fund on the grounds that The Huffington Post couldn’t adequately edit her work.

Freelance Wall Street reporter Teri Buhl tells Business Insider the Huffington Post fund is having trouble “getting any content out” and that they “lied about having their site ready and a having a business editor to edit my work.” Buhl goes on to whine that the editors for the fund had no business editing experience, and that the head of the fund Nick Penniman doesn’t have print experience, hence “he has no idea what he’s doing to try and cover the econ crises.”

Business Insider claims it’s a rocky start for the fund, but that’s only true if you accept that the fund mistakenly hires snotty journalists who need their hands held and are incapable of functioning without the intense participation of an editor. As we know, that model is working great for newspapers in 2009.

The Huffington Post investigative journalism fund needs to add the following question on the application for writers: are you capable of looking after yourself? If not, please do not apply.

The Huffington Post acquires the New York Times

Duncan Riley — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:00:29 +0000

The Huffington Post today announced that it has acquired a majority stake in the New York Times Company.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but is believed to have been facilitated with the help of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, a major investor in the company. Slim will maintain a minority ownership stake, and under the deal obtained ownership of the physical assets of the group, including outright ownership of radio station WQXR-FM.

Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington said in a statement that the New York Times would cease print publication on Friday, after which it would become an internet only publication. A decision has not been made about the future of the New England Media Group, (which includes The Boston Globe) but it is believed that the group will be shut down, and the Boston.com web portal folded into a new Boston local site on HuffingtonPost.com. Successful blog come information portal About.com would be folded into a new service tentatively called “The Huffington Wiki.”

“This is an important milestone in the history on online journalism” said Huffington. “The New York Times has a long future ahead of it, and we look forward to the challenge of making this company great again, without the burden of newsprint.”

Final job cuts for the group have yet to be finalized, but Huffington assured any employee laid off that they would be welcomed warmly if they applied for unpaid blogging positions at either the NYTimes.com or HuffingtonPost.com sites.

Huffington Post announces investigative journalism venture

Steven Hodson — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:25:02 +0000

One of the things we are constantly hearing as we move from an old media world to a new media world is the danger of losing investigative journalism as newspapers head further in their downward spiral. so it is interesting to read of the announcement on Huffington Post that they will be funding; in collaboration with Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors, the Huffington Post Investigation Fund. The fund will have an annual budget of $1.75 million which will be enough for ten staff journalist.

This venture came about because Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief, is concerned that the massive layoffs being experienced in the newspaper industry is hurting investigative journalism at a time when it is needed most. Huffington also hopes that this move will encourage others to fund similar ventures.

The Huffington Post skews liberal, but its founder promised that the work done by the investigative fund would be nonpartisan. The group would be discredited quickly if it puts out faulty information, said Nick Penniman, the fund’s executive director.

"We care about democracy, not Democrats," he said.

Rosenstiel said the HuffPost is following another recent trend encouraging content to be reproduced virally for maximum exposure, instead of trying to direct people exclusively to the site.

The HuffPost also promises to give a higher profile to work produced by other reporting groups, such as The Center for Public Integrity and The Institute for Justice and Journalism.

Source: Huffington Post

I realize that there is probably going to be a lot of controversy over this just because it is the Huffington Post but it is an encouraging sign that we are at least trying to find new ways to keep journalism alive.

Huffington Post expanding into sport, tech and books

Duncan Riley — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:36:39 +0000

Arianna Huffington’s uber-blog The Huffington Post is expanding its coverage into three new areas: sport, technology and book.

An ad placed by the Huffpost at MediaBistro calls for editors as follows:

The Huffington Post is looking for web editors with expertise in the following areas: sports; technology and gadgets; and books.
Each editor will create and manage one of three new sections — Sports, Technology & Gadgets, and Books — being launched on The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com) — “The Internet Newspaper.” Editors will develop “destination” pages by overseeing news and a subject-specific group blog.

The Huffington Post is already the webs largest blog (the term is used loosely), delivering 195 million page views a month according to Quantcast, and the site sits in 1st spot according to Technorati.

(via Fishbowl NY)

Media companies may challenge extract linking

Duncan Riley — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:36:25 +0000

Unnamed media companies may start taking to court blogs and sites that quote extracts and links, according to a report by the New York Times.

The report specifically names The Huffington Post and The Business Insider (formerly Silicon Alley Insider) as being particularly guilty of the practice. What both sites do is run an extract of a post or article on another site, then link to that article at a certain point. The argument is that by printing only an extract of the original article, the method is legal under fair use doctrine. The problem being is that fair use under US law has never been really clear on how much content is acceptable.

Without wanting to extract too much (ironically, I picked the NY Times article up on an aggregator site), here’s some choice parts:

But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.

With the Web’s advertising engine stalling just as newspapers are under pressure, some publishers are second-guessing their liberal attitude toward free content.

“A lot of news organizations are saying, ‘We’re not willing to accept the tiny fraction of a penny that we get from the page views that these links are sending in,’ ” said Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. “They think they need to defend their turf more aggressively.”

There’s wrong on one level though. What the Huffpost and AlleyInsider do isn’t scraping, it’s a manual selection of interesting content. Scraping is what a spam blog does when they pull the full content automatically.

The bigger question though is will this discontent result in further legal action to test what constitutes fair use in a court of law? The New York Times sadly settled with Gatehouse Media when the question was last raised.

Where we’ve done a similar post here we’ve always done so with permission of the author, on the basis that we wanted to be on the safe side, and I’ve said previously that I found it interesting that The Huffington Post was acting in this way without permission, given how many sites would beg them to be included. Lets hope someone sues so we can settle what’s acceptable once and for all.

Mark this day: President now takes press conference questions from bloggers

Duncan Riley — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:45:35 +0000

Barack Obama addressed the nation this evening, before opening the doors to questions from the assembled media.

Question number two came from Sam Stein from the Huffington Post.

Stein asked about torture policy going forward and is anyone above the law? Obama said the United States would not torture and “no one above the law” and can be prosecuted — but “generally speaking” he is “interested in looking forward, not backward.”

Stein came back for seconds according to the Huffington Post, asking the President shortly after whether he would overturn the military policy of not allowing media to cover caskets of soldiers coming home from war zones.

A big day for blogging and the Huffington Post. Congrats to Stein and the team.

The Moderate Voice has more on the event here.

Huffington Post Acquires 23/6, will fold into Comedy Section

Duncan Riley — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 02:51:51 +0000

The Huffington Post has acquired IAC’s stake in comedy site 23/6, their comedy joint venture.

Under the deal, 23/6 will be folded into a new dedicated comedy section on the Huffington Post, although reports aren’t clear whether it would keep any part of its current name and branding. Features including Dickipedia will be remaining in place.

Jossip has the full memo here.

Rumors had been circulating that the not greatly successful 23/6 would fold as part of a shakeup at IAC. Traffic to the site is primarily from The Huffington Post itself, and notably has dropped off post election in line with a traffic drop at the Huffington Post.

Huffington Post’s Syndication tricks come back to bite them

Duncan Riley — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 03:26:09 +0000

For most of this year, possibly longer, The Huffington Post has been syndicating articles on their site with links back to the original source. The general idea is to take 2-3 paragraphs from the original source, then link out at the end so that readers can continue reading the article on the original site.

I’ve always found the model interesting, but I also presumed that it was done with permission; we now run a small about of content here at The Inquisitr on the similar basis, although always with permission from authors upfront.

It turns out that The Huffington Post not only didn’t have permission, but at times were republishing full posts, not just extracts.

Chicagoland made the initial call out on content being stolen, then followed up with a pile of extra examples. Ryan Tate at Gawker calls the practice grubby.

Wired got comment from The Huffington Post, saying the examples of full content being used were an error, and that the syndication posts help promote sites and deliver traffic to the source. They also noted that the headlines also link to the source, at that 95% of the time readers never hit the extract page, instead going straight to the source.

It’s a double dose of copyright gray not well considered.

Running 2-3 paragraphs of a longer post with a link back may constitute fair use, but not adding to the content and running it whole (even if only part of the post) starts to get fishy on the fair use part, when considering that fair use in this context would normally be considered when quoting in the context of unique content.

I’m not about to widely condemn The Huffington Post for the practice, poorly played out as might have been the case, but it does very much surprise me that they didn’t attempt to obtain permission up front for printing the extracts; likewise I’m sure that it wouldn’t be hard for them to find willing partners who would welcome their content on The Huffington Post in this way, given the staggering amounts of traffic the site pumps through, where even a small cut of links could instantly deliver tens of thousands of page views each time a site gets linked to.

For others it is a lesson learned: when in doubt, ask for permission. We did.

Huffington Post inks deal with GlobalPost for world news coverage

Duncan Riley — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:04:09 +0000

The Huffington Post has signed a deal with the yet to launch news provider GlobalPost for world news syndication.

GlobalPost is due to launch January 12 (2009) and is offering competition to AP on world news through a network of international reporters billed as the largest from a US news organization outside of AP itself. GlobalPost is competing is an increasing competitive syndication market alongside new comers Daylife and CNN Wire against the increasingly unpopular due to costs AP and to a lesser extent Reuters.

The Huffington Post closed a $25 million round of funding last month and was said at the time to be using the money to expand local coverage and investigaitve journalism. The Huffpost has already started syndicating some world content under their new World News section, and it would appear that part of their new strategy of broadening their appeal base outside of politics includes global news.

Huffington Post Funding Higher Than Expected: $25 Million

JR — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:28:14 +0000

The Huffington Post has raised $25 million in new funding for its site — a full $10 million more than had originally been projected.

The Huffington Post is secured the cash from Oak Venture Partners, as previously rumored and first officially reported in Kara Swisher’s BoomTown column Monday morning. The fresh funding brings the site’s valuation up to almost $100 million, according to estimates quoted in Swisher’s report.

“There is an inevitable shift from offline to online with people increasingly getting their news media online, and this election proved how powerful the Huffington Post could be,” an Oak Venture exec tells BoomTown.

Word first broke in mid-November that Huffington was looking to bring in cash to fund “investigative journalism.” At the time, sources indicated it could be three months before any announcement was made.

Traffic data from Quantcast shows The Huffington Post pulling in a solid 240 million page views per month. It’s down slightly from the 300+ million it was snagging closer to election season, but still an impressive number nonetheless.

Huffington Post raises $15 million: that’s an awful lot of investigative journalism

Duncan Riley — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:43:55 +0000

After word broke earlier this week that The Huffington Post was looking to raise a new round to fund “investigative journalism,” the paper work on that round was actually being signed, and it’s a nice $15 million.

The Times broke the story and notes that the money will be used to expand The Huffington Post’s move into local journalism as well as investigative reporting. The Huffpost launched a local site for Chicago earlier this year. Paid Content claims the new round came from Oak Investment Partners. The site has previously raised $12 million over 3 rounds. Valuation on the new round was $100 million.

The key for the Huffington Post is to keep traffic up post election. Quantcast shows rapid growth to a staggering 302 million page views on 12 million people monthly to today, but the same stats also show the start of a steady decline down after election day.

The Huffington Post has always been an interesting mix of ideas: the site has grown its full time staff (around 20-30 people as of a few months ago) but most contributors to the site do so for free, so its part traditional news site, part blog and part Citizen Journalism play.

Huffington Post seeks new round to fund investigative journalism

Duncan Riley — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:28:26 +0000

Arianna Huffington’s The Huffington Post is seeking a new round to fund investigative journlism.

Hufffington disclose the fact during a panel discussion at Michael’s restaurant in Manhattan Tuesday night. Robert MacMillan at Reuters was there, although he was unable to get more details out of Huffington other than “She said there wouldn’t be any for another three months or so.”

Non-profit and new media interest in investigative reporting has grown recently at the inverse rate to the decline in heritage media companies. Sites and groups such as ProPublica.org, Voice ofSan Diego, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting among others have sprung up to fill the void. Huffington obviously sees a market opportunity, and we wish her well in trying to step in where heritage media is often no longer able to offer comprehensive coverage.

Huffington Post blogger stabs partner 222 times with a screwdriver, shoots self

Duncan Riley — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:43:43 +0000

A political blogger for The Huffington Post was found dead this week after stabbing her partner 222 times with a screwdriver.

Carol Burger, a blogger for the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus election coverage, attacked Jessica Kalish in the garage of their Florida house October 22. Burger then loaded Kalish’s body into her car and abandoned it 2 miles from her house.

She reported Kalish missing to police but committed suicide after police told local media they had found her former partner’s body two days later. According to police reports, the 222 wounds were “clustered around the back of her head and stitched across her back and arms and face … most were between an inch and an inch-and-a-half deep.”

According to a memorial post written by The Huffington Post, Burger was well regarded:

Carol Anne, an award-winning photojournalist and former editor, was an OffTheBus Election Correspondent. She used her background in journalism to bring us ground reports from her home state of Florida – and was very excited to be writing about the presidential election and filed multiple stories a week. She covered a wide range of stories including early voting in Florida, a summit on green jobs with Barack Obama and swing-state governors and a Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation event. Her high energy and curiosity kept OffTheBus editors on our toes.”

Greed vs the greater good: the growing trend of blogs reposting videos as their own

Duncan Riley — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:10:01 +0000

One of the foundations of blogging has been sharing: we share links, we share stories with credit, we may repost an image or video. To date, the system has worked well, but there’s a new trend that replaces the notion of sharing with greed; a greed for traffic and a greed for attention.

We can’t embed an image from another site, so the expected norm has been a system of crediting images used. But video was different. YouTube popularized embedding video, so that instead of having to take a local copy and upload the video to present it on your own site, adding a video became an embed code away. The original uploader wins because they get more views on their video, and where appropriate a link back to their site, and bloggers get to show the video quickly and without any hassles. But things are changing. There’s a growing trend to rip a video and upload it as your own, complete with site branding.

I first noticed the trend on the Fail Blog, from the guys behind icanhascheezburger.com. Here’s an example of a video on the front page today. Note that this isn’t their video, but they’ve uploaded it to their own account and added failblog.org branding to it (and other times the branding includes “as seen on failblog.org).

I sat through a presentation from owner Ben Huh at Gnomedex in August (video can be viewed in this post) and I wanted to ask a question about why they were reuploading videos like this, but I didn’t get the chance. Huh was asked though about copyright, given that most images and videos on the site come from external sources, and all he said in response (and this is for memory) that they don’t have a problem with copyright 95% of the time, but they do act on any complaints when they come in. I’d note also that although Failblog credits the reader who submitted the video, they do so without a link to either the submitter, or the original source for the video.

Political sites join in

Failblog isn’t alone in this practice, although it was the first time I saw it. The trend has spread to political blogs as well, and sites that have started using the practice include TPM and to a lesser extent The Huffington Post. The Huff Post tends to vary between official content providers and its own uploaded content, and we can’t be sure whether they’re ripping video and reuploading it, or some of the video they captured themselves (and there are special mixes as well unique to the site), but TPM’s YouTube channel is full of TPM branded content available elsewhere, including directly from original content providers.

This isn’t an exhaustive list by any stretch, but it’s sites I’ve seen recently, and I’d bet others are doing the same thing as well.

The economics of reposting

The reasoning behind this trend is very simple: numbers, traffic and attention. By reposting this content to their own channels (say on YouTube), sites such as the Failblog build a stronger following through the branding in the videos, and by creating a popular YouTube channel that feeds back to the site. The presumption would hold true for TPM as well: a one stop shop of interesting politics videos, branded, creating a superior destination that drives more traffic and attention.

RedLasso

RedLasso isn’t to blame here, but the trend on political sites to post content uploaded to their own accounts as opposed to grabbing it from other sources seems to have come about in part due to RedLasso no longer being available with an ample selection of clips. The vacuum of content has been replaced by aggressive site specific uploads, particularly where no legal alternative exists. This particularly holds true for the Huffington Post, who switch between their own video and embeds provided legally by content owners such as MSNBC.

Copyright

The interesting thing about the rise of reposting videos is the copyright risk each site takes on when doing it. With traditional YouTube style embeds, the video is embedded from someone else, so if there is a copyright claim, it goes to the person who uploaded the video originally. By reposting this content on their own accounts, the copyright claim falls to the site itself, either directly or via the video host, so the risk to the site itself increases. Failblog is on shakier ground, because nothing they repost is their own, however the likelihood of that content attracting copyright attention is less due to the nature of the content itself. TPM, The Huffington Post and others face higher exposure to copyright claims as the reuploaded videos are normally exclusively taken from television broadcasts. They do have a fair use defense that may well stand up well in court, but the exposure is exponentially higher than before where many of these sites would have run RedLasso content. It’s really rolling the dice on copyright, and hoping that you’ll always get the result you’re after; worth it perhaps given the benefits of reposting the content, but a higher risk than the alternatives.

Conclusion

I’m torn on this trend. I dislike the idea that some sites are so greedy that they feel the need to rip and reupload content as their own, where as in the past blogs would have shared the love, and simply embedded content from the source. It’s a negative trend that goes against some of the underlying sharing principles that have helped the blogosphere grow.

However, I get the economics, and I understand why sites are doing this. I also couldn’t rule out doing something similar in the future, because the numbers case is that strong in favor of doing so. The main reason why I’m not about to start now, and I’m unlikely to do so in the future isn’t just moral (although the moral case is strong), it’s one of ease of use. It’s not super easy or quick to rip a video, brand it, and reupload it as your own (coupled with the fact that upload speeds in Australia make uploading video slower again), where as it’s always far easier to grab an embed code and run the video that way. I’m a touch lazy, and I’m time poor, so embedding wins over reposting.

Overall, this is a trend that deserves great discussion and attention. It may be another sign of the maturity of the blogosphere, that now we’ve past the peak, and money drives the topsites, that some will forgo sharing for an extra edge.

Huffington Post Launches Local Site in Chicago

Dominic Rivera — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 01:28:32 +0000

Huffington Post has gone local with the launch of HuffPost Chicago.

The localization of the site, which was announced by founder Arianna Huffington in June this year during the Future of Journalism event staged by the Guardian newspaper, is a move that shows the company’s direction towards covering all news, not only politics.

“We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to [be] covering all news, not just the political blogging the way we began,” Huffington said in June.

Why Chicago?

“We’ve decided to start with Chicago because it’s always been a great news town – offering a vibrant mix of politics, sports, business, music, food, and urban life. Transferring The Huffington Post’s blend of news, opinion, and community – delivered with our familiar look and attitude – to a local level, HuffPost Chicago is part local news source, part resource guide, and part virtual soap box – featuring a collection of bloggers who know and love Chicago, and are looking to share their takes on everything from the Cubs to City Hall to the hot new local band to the best place for Greek food (and I can testify that there is a lot of that in Chicago!),” Huffington said in a blog post.

So, are we going to see some competition now for local Chicago sites like Chicagoist.com?