AOL isn’t close to shuttering Patch, and don’t look for it to merge with Yahoo anytime soon. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington had to go, and the acquisition of Huffington Post by AOL will be a long-term success, said Arianna Huffington on Tuesday.
The president and editor in chief of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group dismissed questions over AOL's quarterly losses and traffic decline since the merger with HuffPo seven months ago. She said the site was working successfully to grow as a media company. And the merger hasn't hurt, she said.
“The merger has actually had the opposite effect,” she said, at TheWrap's media-leadership conference, TheGrill, at Beverly Hills’ SLS Hotel. She pointed to HuffPo's rise in traffic and expansion in editorial categories.
“Since the integration, the Huffington Post has grown 49 percent and added 24 sections … My dream was to grow in multiple ways at the same time, but we didn’t have the resources available to do that before. All of these new launches we wanted to do would have taken years,” she said.
(Photographs by Jonathan Alcorn)
Huffington Post Media was purchased for $315 million by AOL in February.
(In the video below, Huffington discusses the hazards of running one's business using stock price as a guide. View the full video here.)
Huffington Post traffic has grown to about 35 million monthly unique users since the acquisition by AOL, largely because of the portal's support. But the portal itself has seen steady declines from March all the way through to August, when it had a slight uptick of 10 percent.
Answering questions from moderator Sharon Waxman, Huffington said the uptick was because she replaced two senior editors at AOL. The portal currently has of 109 million uniques per month, having bottomed out in July at 105 million uniques. Yahoo has vastly more traffic than AOL.
Also read: Facebook's Jacobson to Studios: Use Us to Track, Promote Movies
As for the recent international expansion -- which has included the launches of HuffPost Canada and HuffPost UK -- she added, “I don’t know when we would have been able to do that.”
Waxman also grilled Huffington on Patch, the labor-intensive local news initiative launched by AOL before the merger. With Patch employing over 1,000 journalists and costing its parent company around $160 million a year to run, will the newly formed AOL Huffington Post Media keep it around?
Huffington said AOL/HuffPo is just scratching the surface as to how the local-oriented Patch can be melded into the nationally minded Huffington Post. She pointed to a recent story about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who used a police helicopter – at a cost of $2,500 in public funds – to get to his son’s baseball game in June.
