Huffington Post

History

The Huffington Post, often referred to as HuffPost, was launched back in 2005 as an alternative news aggregator to the available options, and was founded by Arianna Huffington, Andrew Breitbart, Kenneth Larer and Jonah Peretti. Arianna had previously worked on a couple of online projects including a website aimed at petitioning for the resignation of President Bill Clinton.

Originally, the Huffington Post focused on crafting its content around trending keywords in order to attract traffic from search engine optimisation, but since the site has begun to focus more on breaking news and current affairs; with some SEO thrown in. Within a year of its launch, the Huffington Post raised considerable capital from investors and by 2008 had expanded into international versions in different languages and investigative journalism practices. The Post was sold to AOL in 2013 and then onward to Verizon Media and Buzzfeed. Since then, the site has continued to develop local editions and is now considered a major news outlet globally.

HuffPost is considered a liberal-leaning media voice, despite its conservative founders, and has courted controversy over its years of operations. Over 30 million unique visitors click through to HuffPost on a monthly basis and it is cited worldwide as a reliable media source.

Key selling points:

• Award-winning site – Peabody Prize (2010), Webby Award (2010), Pulitzer Prize (2012), British Muslim Award (2015)
• Regular notable contributors include President Barack Obama, Deepak Chopra, Phil Radford, and Steve Gilliard
• Their most recent company valuation was upwards of $1 billion.