BoomTown » Huffington Post

As Traffic Booms, Is HuffPo Ready to Make Some Real Dough?

Kara Swisher — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:21:53 +0000

For the past few months, the Huffington Post has been on a bit of a tear–both in terms of traffic gains and in its hiring of some big talent for key positions.

Now, those execs are focusing on using that consumer momentum to achieve what has eluded the Huffington Post thus far: Making some serious bank from the privately held news and media site.

How to help marketers to better understand the site and, therefore, spur this significant monetization will be his main focus at the Huffington Post, said Greg Coleman to BoomTown in an interview over the weekend.

Coleman–a former Yahoo (YHOO) advertising exec, as well as one for Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL–was named president and chief revenue officer a month ago by Huffington Post’s new CEO, Eric Hippeau.

Hippeau, who was himself just appointed in June, is another well-known online media exec and has been a big investor and board member of the Huffington Post. (You can read a thorough interview by Staci Kramer with Hippeau on paidContent.)

“It’s important for advertisers to know how big we have gotten, while also highlighting this amazing audience of influencers we have gathered,” said Coleman, in his first media chitchat since taking on the job. “I think it is the beginning of a tipping point.”

Well, of course, Coleman would say that, as the guy looking to drum up interest among marketers in spending their money on the Huffington Post.

But stats seem to indicate that consumers are increasingly liking what the Huffington Post is creating, because it is starting to surpass some well-known media icons on the Web in traffic.

While more of this increase is going to be due to a socialization of the news–the Huffington Post has an aggressive deployment of Facebook Connect called HuffPost Social News–the growth is more about building a brand people trust and seek out.

According to recent reports from both comScore (SCOR) and Nielsen Online, for example, the site just became larger than several online brands of big media companies, such as the Washington Post (WPO), in terms of unique monthly visitors.

In its September report, Nielsen clocked the Huffington Post at 9.47 million uniques, up 26 percent, while the Post site was at 9.2 million–a drop of 30 percent.

According to the Nielsen, the Huffington Post is within spitting distance of USA Today’s Web site (9.9 million), a Gannett (GCI) property.

And, it is bigger than Hearst Newspapers Digital (7.9 million) and the BBC (7.2 million).

For September, comScore has the Huffington Post (at 6.83 million) besting the Post (6.77 million)–as well as WSJ.com (6.7 million), a unit of Dow Jones, which is owned by News Corp. (NWS).

(The Wall Street Journal site, to be fair, makes a chunk of its revenue from subscription fees, rather than relying solely on advertising from traffic like the Huffington Post. And full disclosure: Dow Jones owns this site.)

In any case, big traffic is key for most news sites, and internal numbers from Google (GOOG) Analytics that Huffington Post execs cite are higher, as is typical for most sites, pegging traffic at about 27 million monthly uniques with more than two million reader comments per month.

Huffington Post co-founder and blogging icon Arianna Huffington attributes the recent boost in traffic to the site’s proclivity to “start conversations” that interest readers, such as her recent suggestion that Vice President Joe Biden should resign.

“We are aiming to go beyond just facts, to create a narrative,” said Huffington, who thinks the speed of news helps attract visitors to the site. “We think bringing journalism to a new level is exactly what people are looking for.”

Perhaps. But, even if traffic increases continue to bear her theories out, she and others have said that the Huffington Post still has not been regularly profitable despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.

While the site is aiming to invest rather than focus too hard on showing profits, Coleman said he would like to make revenue seven times larger in the next years, building on the performance of the site to vaunt past old media giants online.

“This kind of thing is a milestone for the marketing community,” he said. “Our goal is to be the top Internet newspaper, and this points out that we are on our way.”

To do that, he will have to spend some of the $37 million in funding that the Huffington Post has raised from venture investors.

While the edit side is using the money to expand the number of news categories, Coleman said his focus will be on building a higher caliber team of sales and marketing execs with deeper relationships to big clients.

“Unlike selling an auto page on Yahoo (YHOO), our site has a more complex sales process that takes some time for people to understand,” said Coleman. “But once they get it, it should be an easier sale.”

Until then, check out the video of the entire interview I did at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference with Huffington and Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth in which they talk about the future of journalism and more:

[ See post to watch video ]

Former Yahoo and AOL Ad Exec Coleman Poised to Join the Huffington Post as President

Kara Swisher — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:40:28 +0000

In the ongoing game of Internet exec musical chairs, Greg Coleman (pictured here), who has been a top exec at both Yahoo and AOL, is poised to become president of the Huffington Post, as well as chief revenue officer, several sources said.

The deal for Coleman to come on board at the privately held online news site–which has grown significantly over the last year and just added well-known online media exec Eric Hippeau as CEO–came together only recently.

And it is not clear what the role of current Huffington Post Chief Revenue Officer James Smith will be going forward.

The Coleman hiring is most likely the work of Hippeau, who has known him from Coleman’s days as head of ad sales at Yahoo (YHOO). Hippeau has been on the board of the Internet giant for many years.

Hippeau was also a key player in the $5 million investment in the Huffington Post by SoftBank Capital in 2006.

He has also been a director on its small board, which also includes co-founders Arianna Huffington and Kenny Lerer, as well as Oak Investment Partners’ Fred Harman.

Oak recently added $25 million to the funding kitty at the Huffington Post, which is headquartered in New York.

The money will be used to expand the site into the local arena, investigative news, and verticals such as tech, a section set to debut Sept. 21.

It is all being done to build on what has been a strong traffic year for the Huffington Post, which claims it has over 21 million unique monthly visitors.

Nielsen Online has pegged that at the lower figure of 8.9 million, but reported that the Huffington Post was one of the fastest-growing, year-over-year news sites.

Despite that, the site still has not been regularly profitable, despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.

Presumably, goosing that revenue is what Coleman is being pegged to help do–and he certainly has a lot of online advertising experience, having made stops at a lot of Internet companies in the past few years.

He was head of advertising sales at Yahoo for seven years, after another long stint at Reader’s Digest. Yahoo’s ad business grew strongly under him.

But Coleman ran into Yahoo’s management buzzsaw after trouble hit the company in 2007. He was one of the first in a long line of execs to leave the troubled company, departing in one of its many controversial reorganizations.

He was soon running a Los Angeles-based start-up called NetSeer, which focuses on ad targeting.

He then headed to AOL in February to run its Platform-A division.

But when new management was suddenly put in place by Time Warner (TWX) in the spring, Coleman left after only a few months on the job.

After taking the summer off, several sources said, he has recently been looking at a variety of jobs.

That included MySpace, where former Yahoo colleague Wenda Harris Millard–now with Media Link–was hired recently as an outside consultant to help the News Corp. (NWS) social networking site rejigger its ad business.

The Huffington Post spokesman declined to comment when BoomTown inquired about Coleman’s hiring.

Huffington Post and Facebook Go "Social News," With Connect on Steroids

Kara Swisher — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:00:21 +0000

In an unusually robust collaboration using Facebook Connect, the Huffington Post is launching a feature on Monday called “HuffPost Social News,” which lets readers create a personalized social networking-like news page on the Huffington Post itself.

While the Huffington Post had already been using Facebook Connect since January–which allows readers of the site to log in using their Facebook identity to interact, which is mostly used to leave comments–this use essentially takes Facebook Connect and puts it on steroids.

“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.”

Hippeau said he hopes that will lead to more advertising spending, although the first focus is to get people using it.

Such a move is an interesting one for Facebook too, since it is getting unusual prominence and much deeper integration on a popular news Web site, well beyond how other sites are using Facebook Connect.

If it works, HuffPost Social News will give it even more content flowing into its service, a direction that was also underscored by Facebook’s recent $50 million purchase of FriendFeed, the online content-sharing site.

Goosing interactivity and engagement is a big aim for Facebook and also lots of news sites, such as the Huffington Post.

While there are about 1.7 million comments on the site monthly, for example, if users sign up for HuffPost Social News at large rates, that could expand a lot.

This will be done via the special page, as well as a large module on every Huffington Post page you visit showing what your Facebook friends who also sign up for HuffPost Social News are posting, what’s most popular in your network and on the site itself.

As is usually the case with Facebook Connect, you can decide what is sent back to Facebook and can also hide your movements from HuffPost Social News by going into a “stealth” mode.

If left turned on, though, it captures your every click on the site, including what you are reading–which means my social site should constantly be filled with news of Britney and LiLo.

“HuffPost Social News finds your Facebook friends who are also reading HuffPost and links you together on our site so you can dive deeper into the stories you like best,” wrote Huffington in a blog post to readers of her site, which you can read in its entirely below. “The explosive growth of online social networking has fundamentally changed our relationship with news. It’s no longer something we passively take in.”

You can see that in action below on a page I created and also my module (click on the images to make them larger):

Main Personalized Page

Module

And here’s the official press release from the Huffington Post, as well as two blog posts on the subject by Arianna Huffington, one for her site and one for Facebook:

THE HUFFINGTON POST LAUNCHES NEW COLLABORATION WITH FACEBOOK–HUFFPOST SOCIAL NEWS

SOCIAL NEWS PLATFORM COMBINES POWER OF FACEBOOK WITH HUFFPOST CONTENT AND COMMUNITY

Aug 17, 2009–(New York, NY)–The Huffington Post (”HuffPost”) announced today the launch of HuffPost Social News, a collaboration between HuffPost and Facebook® that connects HuffPost users with their Facebook friends, the news they are reading and the stories they are commenting on. Through its integration of Facebook Connect, HuffPost Social News seamlessly combines the news and opinion of HuffPost with Facebook’s user experience and power to connect people.

“I’m excited to announce the launch of HuffPost Social News,” said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. “This new platform lets our community of engaged users easily share stories and post comments for friends to see–it’s HuffPost’s version of a digital water cooler, enriching and deepening conversations around the day’s news. Social media has fundamentally changed our relationship to news. It’s no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, share news, react to news–news has become something around which we gather, connect, and converse. HuffPost Social News makes this more dynamic than ever.”

Said Eric Hippeau, CEO of The Huffington Post: “Our goal is to make HuffPost Social News the go-to place for Facebook users to share news–both the stories they love and the stories they hate–with friends. It should also appeal to marketers interested in reaching passionate, savvy readers who care about the news and who want to share their interests with friends.”

Said Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook: “The Huffington Post has led a revolution in how people discover and consume news. With the integration of Facebook Connect, HuffPost Social News is now leading the way to make news even more of a social experience, giving people new ways to share and filter news and current events through their networks of friends on Facebook.”

HuffPost Social News allows users to increase their presence on The Huffington Post by automatically creating personalized profile pages that keep track of all their HuffPost Social News friends. At the same time, users retain complete control over what stories and comments are shared with their Social News friends, as well as what is posted to their Facebook Wall, and into their Facebook stream. Users can also see how their friends are voting on HuffPost polls and their contributions to “Eyes & Ears,” Huffpost’s citizen journalism platform.

Said Paul Berry, Chief Technology Officer of The Huffington Post: “From the first brainstorming session in Facebook’s office to the integration of Facebook Connect, it has been truly exciting to collaborate in building this product. The future of news is social, and I’m tremendously proud that HuffPost has been so early in reaching this important milestone in how news is shared online.”

Your HuffPost Experience Is About to Get a Lot More Social!

I’m excited to announce the launch of HuffPost Social News–a collaboration with Facebook that connects HuffPost users to their Facebook friends, the news they are reading, and the stories they are commenting on.

When you sign up for it–and I hope you will right now–HuffPost Social News finds your Facebook friends who are also reading HuffPost and links you together on our site so you can dive deeper into the stories you like best. (But don’t worry, you’ll still have complete control over what stories and comments are shared with your friends, as well as what goes on your Facebook wall, and into your friends’ news feeds.)

The explosive growth of online social networking has fundamentally changed our relationship with news. It’s no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news, and share news. News has become an important element of community–something around which we gather, connect, and converse. And we can all become part of the evolution of a story now–expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of views.

HuffPost Social News makes this easier and more dynamic than ever. It takes social news to a whole new level. It will turbo-charge your online conversations and connections, and allow you to build and develop a community that follows what you read and care about.

Thanks to your passion and commitment, HuffPost has an incredibly active and vibrant community. You posted over 1.7 million comments on the site last month alone–with many stories attracting more than 10,000 comments. The one drawback: it’s sometimes hard to keep up with it all.

With HuffPost Social News, you can be sure that your comments won’t get lost in the mix–and that the people you care most about will see what you have to say about the stories you love or are angered by, delivered in real time. And you’ll be able to easily and immediately see who is replying to any of your comments. Of course, your comments will still appear on the full thread, so anyone reading HuffPost will be able to see them.

HuffPost Social News also taps into the other coming big trend in news: personalization. People connecting to each other using their real identities and having real conversations.

HuffPost Social News allows you to have a greater presence on our site by automatically creating personalized profile pages that keep track of all your HuffPost Social News friends–collecting all the comments you have made and the stories you have read, as well as the comments made and stories read by your friends. Think of it as HuffPost’s new digital water cooler.

HuffPost Social News is just one early piece of the social transformation of the news industry. We will be adding more social features and personalization in the coming months. The news is simply more interesting and engaging when we experience it with friends. It is an exciting change and we are thrilled to be part of it.

Sign up here to get started. And let us know what you think. HuffPost Social News is your Huffington Post.

The Future of News Will Be Social

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of 12 books. With HuffPost launching a new social news feature today using Facebook Connect, we asked her to share her perspective on the ways social media is shaping the future of news.

Despite all the current hand-wringing about the dire state of newspapers, we are actually in the midst of a Golden Age for news consumers. We can surf the net, use search engines, access the best stories from around the world, and interact by commenting and forming communities.

The days of publishing pooh-bahs dictating to us what’s important and what’s not are over. We now can get the news we want, when we want it, how we want it and where we want it. The Web has given us control over the news we consume. Now the explosive growth of online social networking is fundamentally changing our relationship with news as well. It’s no longer something we passively take in.

We now engage with news, react to news and share news. News has become an important element of community–something around which we gather, connect and converse. We all are part of the evolution of a story now–expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of views. In short, the news has become social.

And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community, and conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience.

I’ve always been obsessed with news. As the daughter of a newspaperman, I grew up with the smell of newsprint and the buzz of breaking news. I’ve also always enjoyed bringing people together from different parts of my life and facilitating interesting conversations.

In the past, these have taken place around dinner tables, on group hikes or at book parties. Now, via cyberspace, those conversations have gone global. And they are happening in real time.

One of the reasons we launched The Huffington Post was to enhance and facilitate those conversations. While our goal was to create a one-stop spot for news and opinion with an attitude, community has always been a key element of the site. The launch of HuffPost Social News today brings together my two loves:nonstop news and the passionate discussion of the news with my friends.

Using Facebook Connect, HuffPost Social News weaves the news and opinion of HuffPost with the social capabilities of Facebook. It connects HuffPost users to their Facebook friends, the news they are reading, and the stories they are commenting on.

Want to know what your friends are reading? Check out their Facebook-powered stream on HuffPost and the personalized Social News widget that appears as you navigate the site. Want to see your friends’ comments above the thousands of strangers commenting on a story? Log in to HuffPost Social News using Facebook Connect and that happens automatically.

HuffPost Social News also taps into another big trend I see emerging in news: personalization. People connect to each other using their real identities and have real conversations. HuffPost Social News is just one early piece of the social transformation of the news industry. We will be adding more social features and personalization in the coming months, and I expect to see news organizations around the world doing the same.

The news is simply more interesting and engaging when we experience it with friends.

Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington and Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth: The Full D7 Session

Kara Swisher — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:20:24 +0000

It’s an opportune time to see this interview, in which Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington talked about the future of the news media.

The pair were interviewed at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference only a month before Weymouth landed in hot water for trying to organize an off-the-record gathering of D.C. power players and journalists at her house, underwritten by sponsors.

In the interview, Weymouth discussed the struggles the Post–one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers–has had of late as the Internet pummels its business model.

One of those hammers has been Huffington, whose site has grown like gangbusters, led by its political blogs and aggregation. Though not regularly profitable, it recently got a huge slug of funding to keep up the competition.

The pressure was apparent last week when Weymouth got in trouble for offering the exclusive sessions–although the controversial marketing flyer about it went out by mistake, before her approval or that of the Post newsroom.

Here’s the video of the full D7 interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

Arianna Talks About New CEO, New Local Sites and Paying for Content

Kara Swisher — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:34:46 +0000

Huffington Post co-founder and blogging diva Arianna Huffington was in Berkeley this past weekend, keynoting at the Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp 2009.

So, BoomTown took the opportunity to motor over the Bay Bridge to catch Huffington on video between sessions, talking about all the big changes at the news Web site of late.

The interview includes the replacement of its CEO with well-known media exec Eric Hippeau, the launch today of another of its local sites–this time, New York–in an effort to move beyond politics, and what she thinks about the controversies around paying for content on the Web.

Here’s the interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

BoomTown Interviews Arianna, Ken and Eric About Huffington Post Exec Changes: BAM!!

Kara Swisher — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:18:43 +0000

Apparently, if you want to think about the growth of the Huffington Post as a culinary dish, perhaps today’s replacement of CEO Betsy Morgan with longtime online media powerhouse Eric Hippeau might appear under the Emeril Lagasse cooking cliché: Let’s kick it up a notch!

Both co-founders of the online media site, Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, said as much in interviews I did with them this afternoon, after news of the change got out–even as they praised Morgan for the strong work she had done in the 18 months she had been in charge.

“The deal is that we simply have been growing so fast that we needed more firepower to accelerate in expanding the site and monetizing it,” said Huffington, who is also editor-in-chief of the Web news site (and pictured above).

“Things are going great, but things could be going even greater,” added Lerer, who is chairman of the Huffington Post, noting that a more experienced exec was needed at this juncture to take the business to the next level.

“Eric is a peer at all the big companies we need to partner and deal with…and right now, while things are difficult in the economy, is the time when you can really build a company and we had to take advantage of that opportunity.”

So, ipso facto, Morgan was out in favor of Hippeau, who was the key player in the $5 million investment in the Huffington Post by SoftBank Capital in 2006.

Hippeau is a director on its small board, which also includes Huffington, Lerer and Oak Investment Partners’ Fred Harman. Morgan will be vacating her board seat.

Oak recently added $25 million to the funding kitty at the Huffington Post, money that Lerer and Huffington said had not been used yet.

But it soon will be, both noted, with the site expanding aggressively into the local arena, investigative news and verticals such as tech.

It is all being done to build on what has been a strong traffic year for the Huffington Post, which claims it has over 21 million unique monthly visitors.

Nielsen Online has pegged that at the lower figure of 8.9 million, but reported that the Huffington Post was one of the fastest-growing, year-over-year news sites.

Despite that, the site still has not been regularly profitable, said Huffington, despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.

Hippeau (pictured here) has a lot of experience working at a panoply of early online media businesses, including as CEO of Ziff-Davis.

He has also been a longtime Web investor, pushing for SoftBank’s early investment in Yahoo (YHOO), where Hippeau remains a board member.

That should not present a conflict for Yahoo, said Hippeau, which had a short-lived publishing partnership with the Huffington Post.

Hippeau, who has been a managing partner at SoftBank, will become a special partner and adviser to the investment firm. In this capacity, he will continue to work with three start-ups–Buddy Media, BuzzFeed and ThumbPlay.

Hippeau, who is now diving back into an operating role for the first time in almost a decade, said it was hard to pass up the chance to run the New York-based Huffington Post.

“I could not pass such an opportunity, especially with the explosion in the delivery of the news and opinion on the Web,” he said. “This is really the place to build the next really big brand.”

To get to that level, Hippeau said that a lot of things have to happen at the site going forward.

“Clearly we have got to make the revenues commensurate with traffic of the site and size of the opportunity,” he said. “At the same time, we have got to make sure we are very community-focused and using all kinds of new tools to increase engagement.”

Hippeau noted that journalism was changing radically, and “what people want to know is what are people thinking and how can I contribute and we are just at the beginning of this phase.”

Of particular interest to him are real-time data and real-time communications–on sites like Twitter–and the growth of smartphone usage.

“We are getting into a situation in the U.S., where it is so much easier to access all kinds of information and so much more portable,” said Hippeau. “Everyone has talked about convergence for a long time and it is finally here and we are poised to take great advantage of that.”

The moves at the Huffington Post were first reported by paidContent.org.

Huffington appeared onstage at the recent D: All Things Digital conference with Washington Post (WPO) publisher Katharine Weymouth.

Here is a highlights video of the interview I did with them:

[ See post to watch video ]

Twitter's a Big Baby! Apple iPhone's AT&T Problem! MySpace's Blues! No One's Gonna Pay for This Blog! Poll-Crazy at D7

Kara Swisher — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:48:06 +0000

Hey, politicians aren’t the only ones who get to do fancy polls!

Walt and I had a bunch of them about a variety of tech topics that we pulled out to ambush, ooops, pose to speakers at our seventh D: All Things Digital conference last week.

For the D7, we commissioned a study of digital trends from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB), a global market research and consulting company and a conference production partner.

PSB conducted 1,005 interviews within the general U.S. population–you know, real people who are not geeked out.

One showed–despite Silicon Valley hype–how Twitter was still in its infancy, in awareness, engagement and size, which we got Co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams to react to onstage. (They could care less.)

Another showed that the biggest problem that users of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone cited was the poor AT&T (T) network. (Sorry, Randall Stephenson!)

Another looked at the declines in usage of the MySpace social networking site, which we know its new CEO Owen Van Natta enjoyed reacting to in front of the crowd. (Okay, he did not enjoy it.)

Also, no one is paying for subscriptions to blogs, which the Huffington Post impresario Arianna Huffington said was okay, since consumers will only fork over money for “very weird porn.” (Yes, she said that!)

In any case, here is a selection of slides that were shown and discussed during various speaker sessions.

Click on any slide below to enlarge, then hit “next” or “previous” on either side of the slides to page through.

Welcome to Lucky D7: Still Gambling on the Digital Future

Kara Swisher — Mon, 04 May 2009 07:15:55 +0000

Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

It’s been a real winning streak since then for D, due in large part to our great speakers–such as Microsoft (MSFT) icon Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) legend Steve Jobs.

Both have been onstage many times over the years, including a historic interview the pair of tech titans did together in 2007 at D5.

Other amazing speakers have included: Howard Stringer of Sony (SNE), Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp (IACI), legendary director George Lucas, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN), former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman, News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft head Steve Ballmer, Walt Disney (DIS) honcho Bob Iger, Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard (ATVI), CBS (CBS) CEO Les Moonves, Democratic and Republican pols like former Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John McCain, all the leadership of Google (GOOG) and many, many more.

We have had a lot of great moments onstage with all these tech and media players over the years, to be sure, with interviews ranging from the funny to the sublime to the truly disastrous.

But, like the digital industry and the innovation our conference focuses on, we also like to lean forward to try to figure out what the Next Big Thing is around the corner, whether it comes from Silicon Valley or not.

That’s why we’re kicking off our conference on May 26 with two of the founders of Twitter–Biz Stone and Evan Williams–who are riding high on tech’s latest hot thing, which might turn out to be either a rocket ship or a shooting star.

They’ll be followed up over the next two days by a plethora of interesting players, from the leaders of several major mobile companies to content execs hit hard by fast-moving digital forces to a new Internet leader like Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz, who is trying to turn around one of the Web’s great icons from its more recent lackluster path.

And, as we always do, we will be featuring a spate of demos too, trying to see if we can unearth that next next thing.

In the past, the D stage has seen the debut of start-up products like Sling Media’s Slingbox, Aliph’s Jawbone and Pure Digital’s Flip, all of which have gone onto glory. And also some, like Palm’s Foleo, which did not.

While not everyone can attend D, our crack staff is committed to bringing all the action from this year’s conference to readers of the All Things Digital site via up-to-the-minute blogs, photos, videos, tweets, digs and more. We’ll also, as soon as we can, post the videos of each of the onstage sessions, in their entirety.

Until it all kicks off, here is the list of speakers, below, in alphabetical order, who will be appearing at 2009’s D7 conference:

Irving Azoff | CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment (TKTM)

Mitchell Baker | Chairman of Mozilla

Steve Ballmer | CEO of Microsoft

Carol Bartz | CEO of Yahoo

Mark Cuban | Chairman of HDNet and Owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures

Eve Ensler | Playwright and Founder of V-Day

Arianna Huffington | Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo | CEO of Nokia (NOK)

Mike Lazaridis | Co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIMM)

John Lilly | CEO of Mozilla

John Malone | Chairman of Liberty Media Corporation (LCAPA)

Roger McNamee | Partner, Elevation Partners

Jon Miller | Chief Digital Officer of News Corp.

Jon Rubinstein | Executive Chairman, Palm (PALM)

Randall Stephenson | CEO of AT&T (T)

Biz Stone | Co-founder of Twitter

Owen Van Natta | CEO of MySpace

Katharine Weymouth | Publisher of the Washington Post (WPO)

Evan Williams | Co-founder and CEO of Twitter

Jeff Zucker | CEO of NBC Universal (GE)

Arianna Huffington Talks About New Managing Editor Singh!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:12:01 +0000

While in Los Angeles today at the AlwaysOn OnHollywood conference, BoomTown ran smack into blogging empress Arianna Huffington.

She was there to give a speech called “Video Killed the Radio Star…But Can the Web Actually Save Journalism?”

Her answer was a decided yes, especially with great journalists working online, such as the new managing editor of the Huffington Post, whom the mega-blog has just hired.

That would be former CNET Networks Editor-in-Chief Jai Singh (pictured here), who quit the tech news and reviews company last year after a dozen-year run.

“The bottom line is the Huffington Post has figured out how new media should be…and that’s what attracted and appealed to me,” said Singh in an interview today.

While only on the job for a few days, he noted that he will be looking at more video on the site, as well as focusing on its new vertical strategy.

Singh is moving from San Francisco to New York, where the Huffington Post HQ is located. (Huffington herself is, ironically, located in L.A., doing her work out of her Brentwood abode.)

Singh has been a true online news pioneer, creating News.com for CNET in 1996. CNET is now owned by CBS (CBS).

Here’s my video interview with Huffington, talking about Singh’s appointment and the future of the news business:

[ See post to watch video ]

When in Rome, Do as the Romans Do (As in, No Twittering or Much iPhoning)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:45:08 +0000

BoomTown’s visit to Italy has been eye-opening in a lot of ways, not the least of which is to be reminded that not everyone in the world is jacked into the matrix 24/7.

In other words, Julius Caesar conquered Rome, but Twitter definitely has not.

In fact, the conference being held here is aptly called “Tutto Cambio, Cambiamo Tutto?” (I came here to interview Huffington Post editrix Arianna Huffington and LinkedIn founder and CEO Reid Hoffman onstage about innovation and online trends.)

That roughly translates into “Everything changes, let’s change everything?”

This is not a question that is much asked in Silicon Valley, which changes just like the weather, embracing change for change’s sake.

But here, whether or not to change is much more of a debate–one in which change does not always come out on top.

Internet penetration is much lower here than elsewhere in Europe, as is everything from per capita computer ownership to online advertising spending. Television still dominates most media.

“We’re 2,000 years old” is something you hear a lot from people as an explanation for approaching everything, from social networking to iPhones to anything interactive, with some wariness.

While most people here note that they like Facebook, prounounced “FAY-sa BOO-ka,” hardly anyone sees the point of Web 2.0’s trend du jour, Twitter (“TWEE-tur”).

In fact, few have heard of it, and those who have don’t use it.

And while several people have iPhones, no one seems over the moon about the Apple (AAPL) phenom or captivated by its potential to herald Web 3.0 as the mobile revolution.

In any case, here is a video I did, speaking to both Huffington (here is her blog on the event) and Hoffman, as well as to several Italians at the conference:

[ See post to watch video ]

Romeward Bound

Kara Swisher — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:07:33 +0000

BoomTown is winging toward Italy this weekend to participate in an interesting gathering about digital and other issues related to innovation.

The once-every-seven-year conference apparently gathers all of Italy’s most powerful leaders, companies, and brands to discuss the future of their businesses and the changing nature of the relationships between companies, consumers and brands.

This year focuses on disruption and change, with the event titled: “Tutto cambia. Cambiamo tutto?”

That roughly translates to: Everything changes. But do we change everything?”

Si, cari i miei geek italiani!

While there, I will be conducting an onstage interview with Huffington Post co-founder and blogging diva Arianna Huffington and another with LinkedIn founder and CEO Reid Hoffman.

I honestly know next to nothing about Italy and the Web except that one of the country’s prosecutors recently decided to sue Google (GOOG) for defamation and breach of privacy over a nasty video it hosted.

But here are some interesting items I found today:

From Scientific American:

“Concerned that Christians are not entering the Lenten season (which began last week on Ash Wednesday) with the proper spirit, some clergy are calling on their flock to nix text messaging for the next six Fridays leading up to Easter on April 12. Christians are annually asked to refrain from eating meat on Fridays and to pray more regularly during Lent, but the church has apparently gotten hip to the hold that technology has on its brethren. The diocese of Modena-Nonantola in Italy in particular is calling for text-messaging-free Fridays as a way for the faithful to at least temporarily rid themselves of reminders of “material wealth,” but the church is also calling for such digital abstinence in the name of human rights.

The diocese, in a statement on its Web site (translated from Italian to English using Google’s translation software) notes that 80 percent of the mineral coltan–a metallic ore used to make used in consumer electronics products such as cell phones, DVD players, and computers–comes from Kivu, the war-ravaged eastern region of the Congo, where “civil war has caused more than 4 million deaths in the last ten [sic] years.” The diocese says that the extraction and trade of coltan by Western industry has helped fuel warfare in this region of Africa (a statement, they say, backed by a 2003 United Nations report).”

From ANSA.it:

“One out of four Italians have been a victim of identity theft at one time in their lives and one out of two of these discovered this by looking at their bank statements, according to a new report.

Drawn up by the consumer group Audiconsum, the report found that Italians are otherwise savvy about new forms of financial fraud and only 15.5 percent of the population has fallen victim to phishing, fraudulent emails from alleged banks and credit companies seeking financial and personal data for criminal purposes.”

From Billboard:

“According to data gathered by the auditors Deloitte on behalf of the major labels’ representative body FIMI in Italy, music sales (CDs, music, DVDs and digital) fell by 21 percent in 2008.

Total sales (after returns) were worth €178 million ($223.7 million) in 2008, as opposed to €224 million ($281.5 million) in 2007.

According to a FIMI statement, total turnover in Italy in 2008 returned to the same level of 1989.”

Of course, I will be there ferreting out my own info about the Italian Web scene, in an abbondanza of text and videos.

But until I post from there, here’s a trailer from one of my old favorite cheesy movies, “Three Coins in the Fountain.” (Hello, Rossano Brazzi!):

New GM for IAC's Secret Tina Brown Project

Kara Swisher — Wed, 21 May 2008 07:05:42 +0000

OK, not that secret a project.

BoomTown has known about it forever and Radar Online gave the lowdown about the creation of the hip-sounding news aggregator Web site–headed by high-profile editor Tina Brown (pictured here)–by Barry Diller’s IAC (IACI) in a report in early April.

Think the Huffington Post, but more culture and less political wonkishness in a bolder and more colorful design.

While still in its planning stages, though, it just hired a new GM to run the business: Caroline Marks.

She was GM of Comcast’s Ziddio, a social video endeavor, and was also head of content development for Comcast Interactive (CMCSA). Marks has also worked in several high-profile mobile companies in the U.K.

Marks will reports to IAC’s Nick Lehman–who works for Michael Jackson, the head of programming at IAC–to get the project off the ground for IAC and Brown, the former Talk, Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor.

The project has already hired Edward Felsenthal, the former deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal (and BoomTown friend), to helm the edit side under Brown.

IAC has dabbled a lot in online content initiatives of late with mixed results. Still, it is moving forward with even more.

For example, the company is set to debut a personal financial site in a joint venture with News Corp.’s (NWS) Dow Jones (owner of this site), called FiLife, in June.

Arianna Bests Drudge?

Kara Swisher — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 08:24:45 +0000

Could it be a digital indicator that the Blue states are taking back ground from the Red ones–at least in cyberspace?

In February, for the first time ever, Arianna Huffington’s liberal political mega-blog and news site, the Huffington Post, has apparently surpassed the longtime mighty blog leader, Matt Drudge of the conservative/populist-leaning Drudge Report, according to recent traffic data reports from both comScore (SCOR) and Nielsen Online. (Both are pictured here.)

According to data from Nielsen Online, for example, the Huffington Post’s traffic–as measured by monthly unique visitors in the U.S., at home and work–has more than tripled since February of 2007, when it had about 1.1 million unique visitors; by February of 2008, unique visitors had risen to 3.7 million.

In that same month, the Drudge Report had 3.4 million (it had 2.75 million in February of 2007).

Data from comScore is different, as measurement data often is, but shows the same trend (see chart below). The Huffington Post jumped from 457,000 unique visitors in the U.S. at all locations, but had risen to 2.3 million in February of 2008.

For Drudge, comScore reported that it had 1.2 million unique visitors in February of 2007 and 1.6 million in February of 2008.

Of course, internal logs at both sites are likely to show much higher numbers than either comScore or Nielsen Online, by a factor of even four or five times.

Sources at the Huffington Post, for example, said that logs show 12 million uniques for the last month, which they attribute to the addition of new vertical sites within the main site, as well as an increased interest in political news and analysis.

In comparison, Drudge’s site notes it had 21.8 million visits in the past 24 hours. But the site does not define this figure, and it is not and cannot be compared to unique visitors.

“We couldn’t be more pleased with our traffic growth and look forward to continuing to build out our brand,” wrote Arianna Huffington in an email, asking about the traffic spike on her site.

(BoomTown sent an email to the Drudge Report’s contact email on its site late last night, asking for a comment about the data, and will post a reply if I receive one.)

Today, I Don't Pay Arianna One Thin Dime to Vlog About DonorsChoose.org!

Kara Swisher — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 08:31:20 +0000

Yesterday, we slapped around VC Fred Wilson in our ongoing efforts to overtake him in our increasingly annoying journey to extract donors and dollars from geeks for a charity called DonorsChoose.org.

It’s working! We’re now hovering near $10,000 with 35 donors and solidly in the No. 2 slot, although Wilson does march on like Sherman to the sea with $16,566 and 61 donors.

So go now and to click on through to our AllThingsD page on DonorsChoose.org here or use the thermometer on the left side of this page to give early and often!

We are nearing the halfway point of the October Tech Blogger Challenge for DonorsChoose.org, which funds classroom projects in high-need public schools, using the Web to match teacher project requests with donors. AllThingsD picked tech projects in both San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

Besides raising funds for kids who need it, we also hope to win an award Yahoo is sponsoring for the tech blogger who garners the biggest number of donors–a free lunch with CEO Jerry Yang! And it must be ours!

Thus, it’s time for a Web celebrity endorsement! So, here’s Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post, which recently got into a little bit of controversy when one of its top execs said they’d never pay their bloggers!

Well, I didn’t pay her either and absolutely did not hand her her lines at all–except, well, all of them.

Although New York Times poobah Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who was passing by when I was making the video at Google’s Zeitgeist event yesterday, did jokingly chastise me for telling her what to say, it was actually the whole point of egregious fund-raising tactics. (But thanks, Arthur, for keeping me honest!)

So, remember to click on through to our AllThingsD page on DonorsChoose.org here to give early and often!

And here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Arianna Meets the Women of Silicon Valley

Kara Swisher — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 13:39:53 +0000

Last night, Arianna Huffington appeared at the Women of Silicon Valley dinner reception, a regular gathering that has been organized by top Google executive Sheryl Sandberg at her Atherton, Calif., home.

The event features a wide range of speakers, all women so far, talking to a broad swath of typically high-ranking women technology executives from Internet, software and hardware companies, as well as from other walks of life, about a range of issues.

Last night, Huffington was there to talk about her powerhouse site, the Huffington Post (disclosure: I have written for it–although I was not paid and wrote about issues related to my sons) and get feedback about the announcement of its expansion, which will include new sections in areas like living and tech.

Many at the group discussion had never met the commanding blogger, and she upped the glam quotient in staid Silicon Valley on a quantum level. Earlier in the day, Huffington appeared for a book talk and signing at Google for her recent tome, “On Becoming Fearless…in Love, Work, and Life.”

The conversation last night, not surprisingly, centered a lot on the struggles of working professional mothers and on the status of women in the workplace.

Here’s a video I did of the event:

[ See post to watch video ]

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.