Huffington Post and AOL Deal: A disaster in the making

When I heard about The Huffington Post selling to AOL I thought, what’s this all about? But I realized gradually dying and rather meaningless AOL has only been kept alive in the last few months because of the publishing properties they’ve purchased, including TechCrunch and Engadget, both of which are technology-focused review-and-comment sites. These sites still run very independently, reflecting the personalities of their editors.

What they bring to AOL is added traffic from loyal followers. Now, with the Huffinton Post coming on board and Ariana Huffington given broader control over all editorial, what will happen? The Huffington Post has a distinctive editorial viewpoint that can and does dominate its site. How does this fit with the other aspects of the AOL line of properties?

One community online or just more page views?

To me it sounds and looks like a disaster in the making. I do not see the other online properties fitting with the distinctly politicial side of the Huffingoton post. Even the Huffinington Post’s own demographics don’t fit with the older legacy demographics of AOL (after all who really still uses an AOL email address). My kids don’t even know what AOL is!

I see a lack of real strategy toward building a bigger online community and more of a move towards adding revenue based on targeted groups. Having been recently attended the Ad:Tech conference in San Francisco, it’s really obvious to me that online properties are all about unique hits and unique page views. How do you keep that all under one brand? Yahoo, for instance,  has been unable to handle this kind of challenge. It’s a brand that is all things to all people in all ways—there’s no real “there” there.

AOL really sells junk

AOL says it’s a media company, but according to Ken Auletta, reporting in the New York Times, what AOL publishes is mostly junk, and 80 percent of its profits come from a shady little business—charging subscription fees  to ignorant longtime users with old AOL addresses who don’t understand they don’t have to pay for AOL service, and should be getting it free.

Something from nothing?

Now, with Huffington AOL, what will this brand become? Can it really become anything? Will it become one brand and what will the brand be? Over the next year we’ll see if there’s some real growth and value to this brand or if we’ll see some AOL properties fighting it out with Ariana.