AOL buys Huffington Post for $315 million

AOL buys Huffington Post for $315 million
one small voice

Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington announced late Sunday that the site agreed to a $315 million buyout offer from AOL. This deal guarantees AOL will be closely watched not only by media observers but also by Silicon Valley companies.

The very liberal-leaning Huffington Post online news site has been one of the few internet content start-up success stories with over 1000 contributors and sizable ad revenue. AOL is the elder statesman of online access and digital content. It is also the owner of the "Patch " local blog network which our own local Ridgewood Patch is part of.

It was less than a week ago that a document called “The AOL Way”  was leaked showing how serious AOL is about its latest incarnation of the strategy to shift from a "technology" company to media company. Many industry insiders were caught unaware that people were still refereed to AOL as a "technology" company .

Its seems like only yesterday when we heard all this the first time with the much ballyhooed AOL/Time Warner merger. The merger marked the begging of the end of AOL network dominance and some would also suggest the the beginning of the end of the of the dot com boom turning AOL.com into the first dot bomb.