BoomTown » Staci Kramer

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 ]

A Techtastically Busy Week: A Grab Bag of Digital Stuff to Consider

Kara Swisher — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:31:58 +0000

It’s another packed week for tech, especially in Silicon Valley, where the kibitzing never ends and the econalypse is almost completely ignored.

First up this week is an event today at which BoomTown will appear called “The Free! Summit: Inside the Digital Economy” in San Mateo.

Given all the recent debate about free versus paid, as traditional media companies take aim at the issue, it should be interesting.

I will be on an afternoon panel called “Business Models That Work,” which is about the the future of news and what’s next for journalism in the digital economy.

The other panelists are: Dan Gillmor, Director, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University; Alan Mutter, Adjunct Faculty Member, Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and founder, “Reflections of a Newsosaur”; and Marshall Van Alstyne, Associate Professor of Information Economics, Boston University and Visiting Professor, MIT.

Later in the day, the event will morph into the third “Tech Policy Summit,” where I get to do a one-on-one interview with Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, Chris Kelly, who is still at the social-networking site but is also now running for the job of California’s Attorney General.

(My All Things Digital partner Walt Mossberg will appear on Tuesday, along with a solid slate of speakers.)

On Thursday, ContentNext Media is holding its third EconSm conference, this time focusing on mobile, in an all-day event in San Francisco.

Speakers include: Zander Lurie, CFO, CBS (CBS) Interactive; angel investor Ron Conway (see my recent video interview with him here); Eric Johnson, president and COO, Wolfgang’s Vault; Joe Kennedy, CEO and president, Pandora; and Kevin Thau, director of mobile business development at Twitter.

Wrote paidContent’s Staci Kramer: “Much has changed as we get ready for our third EconSM–including the name. The acronym is still the same but this year it’s about the intersection of social and mobile. Social media has passed the gimmick stage–although not everyone has figured that out–and is part of the daily fabric for an increasing number of people.”

And, if you have even more time, the Aspen Institute has just published J.D. Lasica’s 110-page e-book, “Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing: The Next-Generation Internet’s Impact on Business, Governance and Social Interaction.”

Lasica told me that he wrote the report after a roundtable of 30 experts in identity and technology (people like John Seely Brown and Esther Dyson) was convened in Aspen to discuss the ramifications of the cloud on a societal level.

He talked the Aspen Institute into releasing the e-book under a Creative Commons license, the first time it has ever done that.

And lest you think this is too focused on just Silicon Valley, I missed attending the Seattle 2.0 Awards last week, but here are the winners:

Best Start-up: Picnik
Best Boot-strapped Start-up: Picnik
Best Start-up CEO: Jonathan Sposato (Picnik)
Best Start-up Technologist: Nat Brown (iLike)
Best Venture Capitalist: Matt McIlwain (Madrona Venture Group)
Best Angel Investor: Geoff Entress
Best Start-up Product Designer: Peter Roman (Picnik)
Best Service Provider to Start-ups: Shannon Swift (Swift HR Solutions)
Best Blog from/about Start-ups: TechFlash/John Cook
Best Social Event for Start-ups: Lunch 2.0 by Josh Maher

It's Actually About Figuring Out How to Sell the Sizzle and Not the Steak, Dean

Kara Swisher — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 07:01:59 +0000

BoomTown read a ton of the various columns reacting to the Associated Press’s announcement of a new initiative to–as near as I can tell–stop the Internet from being the Internet.

I tease, as it is clearly a lot more complicated than that. But AP board Chairman and MediaNews group CEO Dean Singleton seemed very exercised about his mission to “protect news content from misappropriation.”

It’s going to surely be an interesting debate, throwing even more light on both the way the Web has impacted media companies, but also just how valuable those companies are (or are not–for an interesting take on that, see this excellent piece by ZDNet blogger Larry Dignan).

The winner for the most curious quote yesterday, though, was from an interview Singleton gave to paidContent.org’s Staci Kramer about new models to come.

Said Singleton: “Print is still the meat. Online’s the salt and pepper.”

I would actually say online is increasingly the sizzle.

But what Singleton left out, especially given the financial trouble his company is currently in, was far more important–it’s the consumer doing the grilling.

Thus, it goes without saying that the meat could be in danger of being a tad well done if media companies are not careful in how they handle this new attack on how those consumers prefer to get their news.

In the meantime, here is a very pertinent–the Internet is good at that stuff–and very funny video of an “eat your steak” commercial:

Kara Visits EconSM (and Lives Large With Jason Calacanis)!

Kara Swisher — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:00:18 +0000

Yesterday, I traveled to Los Angeles for paidContent’s second Economics of Social Media conference, which opened last night and is being held all day today at the Skirball Cultural Center.

This morning, I am interviewing Steve Wadsworth, who helms Walt Disney’s (DIS) Internet businesses.

And after sating myself with as much Club Penguin info as possible, I will be sitting rapt in the front row, as folks like Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jeff Weiner, Bebo’s Joanna Shields and AOL’s (TWX) Ron Grant talk about how social media is going to finally make money.

BoomTown is on a vision quest to answer that question in the coming year, so we are kicking entrepreneurs and taking names!

Here’s a short video I did on the opening night, including talking to paidContent’s Staci Kramer and Seth Goldstein of Social Media.

But, first, it starts with a tour of my temporary L.A. abode at the home of Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis:

[ See post to watch video ]

Kara Visits ContentNext's Rafat Ali

Kara Swisher — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 04:03:49 +0000

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I went to visit Rafat Ali, the energetic founder of ContentNext Media Inc.

While publisher and editor Ali’s got two other sites, the flagship is paidContent.org, which covers the business of digital content with a fine-tooth comb.

Ali started the site in 2002 after stints at Silicon Alley Reporter and the ill-timed Inside.com. But his entrepreneurial effort has taken off and become one of the better sites for up-to-the-minute information about the online media business.

Just this weekend, for example, Ali broke the news that Wenda Harris Millard was out as Yahoo’s ad chief (though I did predict the move–an educated guess on my part–here last week), as well as posting stories about breaking news at Dow Jones, ABC and the $8 million in funding that Digg founders just got for their new online video show site, Revision3.

ContentNext got a small amount of funding last summer from Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners and recently added longtime online exec Larry Kramer to the board. The company now has 20 employees, including the tireless executive editor Staci Kramer. It makes its revenue via advertising and now also from conferences.

So here is a video I did on my recent visit to ContentNext’s Santa Monica, Calif., digs, which they moved into in March (most of the company’s offices had previously been at Ali’s various homes), along with some observations from Ali:

[ See post to watch video ]