Gawker
The Huffington Post raised $25 million right before traffic cratered post election. Ad Age's Simon Dumenco ran the new numbers and decided HuffPo is just a sad new version of Salon.
Remember Salon.com? It was once worth more than $100 million! Or so the stock market thought. Today it's worth about $700,000. Granted, it has about a quarter as many people coming to the site as HuffPo, and it pays its writers (a drag on earnings), and it now lacks the buzz of HuffPo.
It's also got roughly four times HuffPo's annual revenue, depending how much Huffington made in November. Is HuffPo's buzz and army of unpaid bloggers really worth tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of dollars?
Probably not. Dumenco doesn't think so. But remember, HuffPo said it would use a portion of its money for "select acquisitions." Perhaps Arianna Huffington and her silver-tongued HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer think they can buy their way out of the problems that felled so many online content entrepreneurs before them.
UPDATE: Has anyone heard anything about HuffPo's financial position immediately before taking on its $25 million venture capital round at the end of November? We heard things were pretty dire. ryan@gawker.com
