The Huffington Post, created in May 2005, is the new current star amongst online media. Forget about Slate, Salon and don’t event think about old media venturing into the digital era. HuffPo beats them all.

For its five-years-old birthday gift, in May 2010, the Huffington Post saw its consultation overtake old-well-established digital emanations of print media. Its monthly traffic reached 12.7 million uniques (that’s 12.7 million single individuals who visited the website) and  more than 50 million visits.

New editorial heroes?

Is it big? The same month, the Wall Street Journal got *only* 8.2 million uniques and the Washington Post 7.9 million. The online news leader remains the New York Times, with 18.9 million uniques. The burning question spreading across all editorial lips is, of course: for how long? If you look at the trends below, coming from two different statistical websites, they show how the gap is closing between HuffPo and NYT:

Huffington Post traffic in red (monthly uniques) Image: Comscore, Huffington Post

(c) Comscore

For all editorial actors playing in the digital world, in a perfect timing with the recent controversy about the quality of pure digital players (well, notably in France vis-à-vis Mediapart, the rise of HuffPo is a good news. Believe it or not, you still have people (even colleagues) who miss the good old days when they was no Internet and who believe nothing really serious ever takes place there. You can’t change the world with Facebook, can you?

Huffington Post is a pure player whose editorial model combines more or less everything we’ve discussed in this series. It started as a collective blog, gathering posts by Ms Huffington and her crew of young wannabes:

“A comprehensive list of contributors to the The Huffington Post blog can be found in its “Bloggers Index”, but includes: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Heather Robinson, Michael Moore, Jimmy Demers, Madonna, Alec Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Saskia Sassen, Sheryl Sandberg, John Cusack, Larry David, Nora Ephron, Madeleine Albright, Robert Redford, Anneli Rufus, Neil Young, Rahm Emanuel, Albert Brooks, Mia Farrow, Russ Feingold, Al Franken, Ari Emanuel, Gary Hart, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ryan Reynolds, Richard Patrick, Craig Newmark, Donna Karan, Kenneth Cole, Ryan J. Davis, Donatella Versace, Bill Maher, Cleo Paskal, B.D. Gallof, Lutfullah Kamran, M. K. Asante, Jr., Robert Wright, Larry Gelbart, Stephen Covey Wendy Diamond and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev.”

(Source: Wikipedia)

I wouldn’t decline a synopsis or two by one of those.

The HuffPo is also a news aggregator, a political media, a participative space with comments and a state-of-the-art integration of social media. Amongst all the things you can share on the website, you also can rate articles via your Facebook account (and hence let your friends know what you think of what you’ve just read). This is smart, because you add your own personal value to the pleasure of sharing a resource.

Oh, and they have photo of boobs (you can rate them too on Facebook and let your friend… hum. Maybe don’t.) This is one of the major criticisms raised against the Huffington Post: they’re not serious. They’re not the New York Times. They write about anything. And their readers like it:

Only 250 like those hands (c) Huffington Post

It is true that Politics only amounts to a quarter of the website traffic and that HuffPost is about almost everything. And true too that they don’t earn money – yet.

« The Huffington Post booked about $15 million of revenue last year », says Henry Blodget on Business Insider.  « Sales boss Greg Coleman thinks the company can double revenue this year to $30 million and double it again next year, to $60 million.  And from there, as long as the site’s traffic keeps growing, it’s just a hop, skip, and jump to $100+ million. (…) Now, $100+ million is not the $1 billion or so of revenue of the New York Times. But most of the $1 billion or so of the New York Times revenue is going away (its paper-based ads and subscriptions).  What will be left, eventually, when the NYT’s paper-based distribution finally collapses, are the online revenues.  And those, for now, are in the neighborhood of $150 million. »

Even if Mr Blodget pushes his luck a bit (a smart newspaper won’t quit paper, they will reduce its volume, methinks), the trend is there. Huffington Post is on its way to become one of the major online media.

What can we learn from this for a European institution?

Maybe we could shake things up a bit and bring troubles in our self-well-established order. After all, the only ones we could disrupt are… ourselves.

As exposed in Henry Blodget’s story, the Huffington Post is a typical case of a disruptive technology. Those technologies, which provoke disruption in a well-established order, don’t need to be better than existing ones (at least at the beginning). « Their advantage – the reason people begin to adopt them – is that they’re also simpler, cheaper, and more convenient. » See, they’re not perfect but they work and they please. HuffPost might not be the online media every editorial brain dreams of (even if it’s already enough to fantasize about it IMHO) but people do visit and read because it fits their information needs and because it’s free.

As an European institution, we’ve checked the free part. We might well do our homework on the subversive aspect. Maybe we could shake things up a bit and bring troubles in our self-well-established order. After all, the only ones we could disrupt are… ourselves. Rather than aiming at the perfect, bulletproof communication strategy or rock solid website in 22 languages, we could try a different approach. This what we did on Facebook and it works.

In general, and Huffington Post is not the sole actor doing this, we should proceed more by trial and error. Implementing a functionality in a few languages or on a selection of pages, extending it or removing it according to its success amongst our visitors. Searching for the better, cheaper, more convenient rather than for the perfect way of proposing a feature every serious website has since 2003.

Guess what? People read what they want to

There is a truth which is not easy to hear: European institutions, when it comes to online editorial news and content, are on a niche market. We indulge ourselves in labeling our visitors as « EU experts », with all the possible declinations (journalists, lobbyists, universitarians), while crossing our fingers about catching some *real* citizens in our (inter-) net. Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing bad being a niche market. This is very good marketing segmentation, usually a very profitable one. Some advertisers would happily pay some good money to reach our audience. Our visitors are smart people, international, intellectual…

But we are not in this for the money. We sweat over our stories, editorial concept and content strategies because we want to reach the citizen, my Latvian grandmother, you and, especially, your friends and family who don’t read this blog and have never visited a European Institution website.

There is nothing wrong being a niche – except, maybe, if your aim is to reach everyone. To become mainstream because you believe your editorial production reflects debates, actions and decisions that have an impact on almost everyone at a certain time. If that is your objective, then the remaining inside the niche (who says the Bubble?) will not help you.

« More important from the point of view of the miscellaneous, the Huffington Post has an abundance of bloggers and commentators, representing a wide range of progressive interests, who provide an infrastructure of ideas, facts and opinions that adds context to any story »

What HuffPost teaches us: you can’t tell people what they want to read. They know it and they find it. True, HuffPo covers a lot of subjects, some being more mundane than others. But Ms Arianna Huffington’s pieces are far from being yellow journalism. The Huffington Post covers a wide-range of opinions, always in the American Liberal side. The important word being: « opinions. »

The rising media aggregates posts from other blogs, invites its readers to write and comment, and publishes content from its editorial team. What started as a political blog became the first pure player in five years, just by extending its editorial territory, keeping it free and multiplying its contributors. « More important from the point of view of the miscellaneous, the Huffington Post has an abundance of bloggers and commentators, representing a wide range of progressive interests, who provide an infrastructure of ideas, facts and opinions that adds context to any story » wrote Wired in 2007.

Maybe the real way to reach more than 10 million people a month is to extend our editorial territory. To keep producing and publishing the unique content European Institutions have while multiplying external contributions, opinions, topics. Cooking receipts from all Member States? North psychology versus South therapies? Afghanistan war dispatches? Anything of a certain quality that would appeal to the readers. To apply the recipe explained by Ms Huffington herself:

“Everything is Miscellaneous, is about what happens to institutions, such as news media, when their content gets turned into a big, miscellaneous pile, that anybody can pick out of, and rearrange the pieces. So they lose control over their editorial function, the newspapers do. They lose control over their front page, which obviously is a huge part of their value.

So you look at the Huffington Post, which has a couple of dozen news sources. It presents its own front page. It has its own staff of I don’t know how many bloggers who are writing there. And it is a rearrangement of this miscellaneous pile of news in a way that makes sense to the progressive readers of this site.”

And I haven’t mentioned European boobs slideshow – yet.

This post is part of a series about online editorial models.
Online editorial models #01 – Ours
Online editorial models #02 – Link journalism
Online editorial models #03 – Networked journalism
Online editorial models #04 – Media-enabling journalism aka lol-journalism
Online editorial models #05 – The Huffington Post case

*** Sources ***

Five Years Later, The Huffington Post (And Online Media) Are Coming Of Age
Here’s What People Actually Want To Read
This is the Future of the News: The Arianna Huffington Interview