HuffPo – AOL Dealbreaker Averted: “No Mushrooms”
by J. Thomas Duffy
Logging on yesterday, I expected to be hit, like a tsunami, with Super Bowl news.
Instead, the conflagration was all about this;
AOL Buys Huffington Post for $315 Million
I have always thought of AOL as the Horse–and-Buggy of the World Wide Web.
I mean, the bulk of their revenue comes from people still using dial-up services.
High Tech companies, Internet companies, and such have been booming, falling from the sky, like, say Google and Facebook, and many others, out there doingbig, fast things, and there was AOL, looking out the garage door, polishing the reins, and longing to ditch the horse and get out there in the growing World Wide Web.
They’ve, seemingly constantly, been doing the “My Sister/Mt Daughter” thing, dealing with their troubles.
But, the deal was done, at the Super Bowl, and Arianna Huffington is now a media mogul.
Holy Cow!
Me thinks that, while Dallas is where the “I’s” were dotted and the “T’s” were crossed, she sealed the deal some months earlier:
Around the same time, I got an email from Tim Armstrong (AOL Chairman and CEO), saying he had something he wanted to discuss with me, and asking when we could meet. We arranged to have lunch at my home in LA later that week. The day before the lunch, Tim emailed and asked if it would be okay if he brought Artie Minson, AOL’s CFO, with him. I told him of course and asked if there was anything they didn’t eat. “I’ll eat anything but mushrooms,” he said.
For the saving grace of not serving mushrooms, Hufffington gets to do this millennium’s first updated Charles Foster Kane thing, albiet, not in print, but on the World Wide Web, with her new Xanadu being good, ole AOL.
And there’s plenty of good snark going on.
Max Read, over on Gawker offered:
Somewhere, right now, Tina Brown is trying to sell The Daily Beast to Compuserve.
[snip]
Swisher writes that Huffington and
Armstrong’s “motto” is “One plus one equals 11.” Which, ha, Huffington better hope that’s true if her writers are going to make AOL’s insane pageview targets. To that effect, AOL content will be “integrated deeply” into the HuffPo site—alongside terrific HuffPo content like “What Time Does the Superbowl Start?” and “How to Date an Indian (Advice for the Non-Indian).” The new media landscape is going to rule.
Now, by contrast, the constraints on Huffington are much fewer. Lyons frets that “all those bright young things with the glamorous job of writing for the Huffington Post are being sent down into the belly of the AOL galleyship and assigned to an oar” — but the fact is that Armstrong bought HuffPo, and TechCrunch before it, precisely because his galleyship model of managing writers was a signal failure. Arianna gets much more bang for her buck — and has happier and more loyal employees.
[snip]
Best of all, from Arianna’s point of view, is that all the extra investment she wants to make in editorial, starting with HuffPost Brazil, is going to be paid for not by rapacious venture capitalists looking for monster returns on their investment, but rather by
befuddled and elderly AOL subscribers with broadband connections who don’t understand that they can cancel their $20-a-month subscriptions and still keep their AOL email address. That stream of cash won’t last forever, but it’s never going to interfere with Arianna’s editorial decision-making
mistermix, over on Balloon Juice;
I wonder who will quit first: the unpaid Post writers who aren’t making a dime from this deal, Arianna’s Hollywood buddies, or Arianna herself.
All you writers over on Engadget,
gratefulness and gratitude for being able to write for such a great icon, for
nothing.
! + ! = 11?
Sounds like some of Tom Lehrer’s New Math
Bonus Riffs
Erick Schonfeld: The Arianna And Tim Show: It’s About Women, Power, And Local
Jill: Mrs. Arianna Huffington, YOU’VE SOLD OUT!!
Kevin Drum: Arianna Huffington: The $315 Million Woman
Bonus Bonus Riffs
Barry Crimmins: Financial Modeling for Fun and Profiteers
Retro Garlic: HuffPo Still Impacting Auto Industry
Retro Garlic: Someone Teach Arianna Huffington How To Use Google
J. Thomas Duffy writes the satire blog The Garlic. This is cross posted from that blog. He is a Contributing Editor of The Reaction.