AOL can breathe a sigh of relief this morning now that they bought the Huffington Post for $310 million ( pretty cheap if you ask me). Now, the ultimate aggregator these last 13 months in AOL has now deferred and bought the second most ultimate aggregator in HuffPo!
As Jeff Jarvis blogged this morning about, it's pretty safe to say that the Portal is dead, SEO is toast and if you aren't on the gravy train for content aggregators your new media business model might be dead in the water.
New Media is now old media with a new skin, fancy search terms and innovative ways for monetization. In the end, it's the content providers that might lose out in the end. Murdoch's The Daily is saying they can't price images in a sensible way ( right now) because they are new, don't have numbers (hard to believe that Apple doesn't spit out a daily report on paid downloads/subscriptions, etc) and advertiser revenue can't be counted just yet. ( Although the Superbowl ad they ran last night was really, really boring and you're telling me that didn't cost half of what their start up fee of $30 million ? ..must be nice to be owned by the network that runs the superbowl)
But I digress, let's see after all the hoopla dies down and the dust settles. Sure, it's a pefect play for Tim Armstrong to acquire HuffPo. You get north of 100M web visits a month, two media portals for users to be linked back to and a growing video portal that is trending massive hits for AOL since acquiring their video partner GoViral.
It's interesting to hear former AOL/Time Warner chief Steve Case moan about how he's been through major mergers before and he's been there done that ( the world's worst media partnership) but let's give this one some time since AOL along with PATCH, Engadget, Tech Crunch has marched along with scooping up experts and best of class sites for specific ares of editorial. Case only had AOL and a running yellow man logo who relied on people subsrcibing to dial up services with their outdated ISDN lines and hardly any content ( hello who uses AOL email and messenger anymore? )
Meanwhile, over at the Newsbeast ( Newsweek and The Daily Beast) let's see how they'll answer this major coup that AOL ( with a lot more IPO Cash to flash around) pulled off to be competetive. It's going to get tougher to get better talent and more importantly to retain it!
In the end, this new media landscape that seems to take place minute by minute is exciting yet feels samey in a way when the big hollywood studios lacking the independent street cred in films starting buying up ( then selling off) indy studios and/or creating their own in-house. This seems eerily familiar!
I like The Huffington Post. I don't like AOL as much but now that they have merged I'll be sending my traffic to one of these in one way or the other.
The conversation in our industry will be who will be able to supply that much content to all these peripheral sites and sister websites. Who will partner with you, who needs to think about consolidating even more so in 2011!
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