It was hilarious, briefly, to wake up to the news that Arianna Huffington had
to become the head content-editor for “a newly created Huffington Post Media Group.” Lots of people had
to say about it. But then, oof. This is our media news of today? It feels like a dusty package that fell behind a conveyor belt in the UPS processing center in
: apparently pointless company buys apparently meaningless company for unimaginable sum of money.
Huffington Post?
The
Huffington Post? I suppose there’s something impressive about how if you Google ”
Packers interception touchdown video
” today, the
is a Huffington Post page with a video clip on it—with NFL.com nowhere in sight. Just as yesterday, HuffPo had cornered the SEO market on searches for
.
But how much value is there in having those generic search results arrive under the Huffington Post banner? For me, the Huffington brand value is negative, if anything—I don’t think of Arianna Huffington as a reliable source for news about football, and I half-suspect that clicking on the links will bring up some paranoid ravings about the
.
And the underlying business-technological fact that Huffington Post, as of Super Bowl Sunday 2011, was the champion of kickoff-time SEO? On Super Bowl Monday, that supremacy seems to be worth about $314,999,999.9995 less than AOL paid for it. Someone will come up with a better SEO-gaming content farm. Someone always does.
So what does the purchase mean? It means that there is still some ridiculous money sloshing around the economy, after all. And it means that Arianna Huffington has, for the second time in her career, found a big payout at the end of an
implausible-seeming relationship
. Congratulations. Can’t wait to see the third act.
