Digg This, HuffPo: What’s $200 Million Divided by 2009 Reality?
What if the privately held Huffington Post is worth not $200 million–a cracked-out number floated last year–or even $100 million, but, say, $2 mil?
This is not entirely an academic question, given that in December HuffPo astonished media watchers by securing $25 million in additional funding from Oak Investment Partners, a Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital firm. The timing was particularly amazing, given that the lefty uber-blog’s traffic has lately been plummeting–a possibility my colleague Nat Ives examined way back in October. At the time Arianna Huffington insisted to Nat that the “Huffington Post is no longer as dependent on politics,” and so she wasn’t particularly worried about the usual post-election readership swoon of politically-focused publications.
That $200 million figure first appeared in a Brian Stelter piece in the New York Times last spring. “According to one person who was briefed on discussions but was not permitted to speak for attribution,” Stelter wrote, “the company has at least looked at the value of the site if it were put up for sale, and a figure around $200 million was used.”
