So they gave the woman who started this online news rag the boot after they took over. Don't know what to say about that; I personally think it's lousy but who knows, maybe she was no good at the job. Can't say I believe that being she built it up in the first place.
The Huffington Post is officially nudging Arianna Huffington out of its name.
The namesake site co-founded by Ms. Huffington in 2005 is now simply: HuffPost.
Ms. Huffington departed as editor in chief in August to focus on her new wellness startup, about a year after Verizon Communications closed its acquisition of AOL, which owned the Huffington Post.
The new streamlined brand comes at a critical time for HuffPost, which recently installed Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times as its new editor in chief and Jared Grusd as chief executive. As part of the rebranding effort, HuffPost has also undergone a major site redesign, unveiled Tuesday.
The brand tweak is likely to garner the most attention in media circles. The site is trying to pull off a neat trick: honoring the influence of a founder who at one point singularly reflected the site’s sensibility, while also proving that HuffPost is bigger than any one person.
“Arianna’s drive and wit still flow through HuffPost,” said Mr. Grusd. “The new name is a real homage to her legacy, but it also sort of moves us forward. The site is almost 12 years old, and is bigger than just one person. Our identity now means a lot of things to a lot of people. So this is sort of us saying, ‘Here’s what we are doing in the new world order.’”
Part of that new world order includes a new logo and slicker design—one with hopefully more impactful ads. That means more prominent video ads on HuffPost’s front page and throughout the site, and more “native” content produced for advertisers, said Mark Silverstein, HuffPost’s head of business development and monetization.
The full redesign afforded HuffPost an opportunity to pare down the list of ad tech partners employed by the site, which should speed up performance, said Mr. Silverstein.
Plus, HuffPost took this opportunity to ditch a number of ad
units that “nobody wanted anymore,” he said. Over the years, HuffPost,
like many publishers, kept adding new ad types without getting rid of
older ones. “We’d have 16 iterations of essentially the same thing
except one version would have 10 extra pixels or one pixel more,” Mr.
Silverstein said.
In addition to running a shorter list of ad versions, HuffPost is experimenting with moving around ads and content, including putting editorial posts on the far right of its pages—real estate that is typically claimed by ads. It is part of an effort to fight consumers’ conditioning to turn a blind eye to banner ads, Mr. Sliverstein explained.
HuffPost reached over 78 million unique visitors in the U.S. in March, down from about 82 million during the same month a year earlier, according to comScore. The site had almost 94 million users in November during the height of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Overall, HuffPo Media Group, which also includes AOL News, ranked seventh in March in the U.S. in comScore’s news and information category.
When Ms. Huffington created the digital-only news outlet more than a decade ago, it was envisioned as a liberal answer to the Drudge Report and gained notoriety as a news aggregator and a blogging platform where most writers weren’t paid.
It was acquired by AOL in 2011 for $315 million, and Ms. Huffington’s future with the site became somewhat unclear in the wake of Verizon’s acquisition of AOL in 2015. Then in August 2016, Ms. Huffington announced she was leaving to focus on her new startup, Thrive Global, a health and wellness site.
For her part, Ms. Huffington said she fully endorsed the name tweak and redesign, noting that many of publication’s social channels and its mobile app already carried the “HuffPost” brand.
“As the world moves further and further away from desktop toward social and mobile, it makes perfect sense to unify the branding,” she said. “For HuffPost to remain strong it has to constantly evolve.”
Write to Mike Shields at mike.shields@wsj.com
Huffington Post Shrinks Its Name to HuffPost, in a Step Back From Founder
Publication undergoes a rebranding and redesign following co-founder Arianna Huffington’s exit last year
Arianna Huffington, shown
here speaking about Hillary Clinton at the annual LGBT Center dinner on
April 20, left the Huffington Post last year. The site, which she
co-founded over a decade ago, is moving on by shortening its name to
HuffPost.
Photo:
Getty Images
The namesake site co-founded by Ms. Huffington in 2005 is now simply: HuffPost.
Ms. Huffington departed as editor in chief in August to focus on her new wellness startup, about a year after Verizon Communications closed its acquisition of AOL, which owned the Huffington Post.
The new streamlined brand comes at a critical time for HuffPost, which recently installed Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times as its new editor in chief and Jared Grusd as chief executive. As part of the rebranding effort, HuffPost has also undergone a major site redesign, unveiled Tuesday.
The brand tweak is likely to garner the most attention in media circles. The site is trying to pull off a neat trick: honoring the influence of a founder who at one point singularly reflected the site’s sensibility, while also proving that HuffPost is bigger than any one person.
“Arianna’s drive and wit still flow through HuffPost,” said Mr. Grusd. “The new name is a real homage to her legacy, but it also sort of moves us forward. The site is almost 12 years old, and is bigger than just one person. Our identity now means a lot of things to a lot of people. So this is sort of us saying, ‘Here’s what we are doing in the new world order.’”
Part of that new world order includes a new logo and slicker design—one with hopefully more impactful ads. That means more prominent video ads on HuffPost’s front page and throughout the site, and more “native” content produced for advertisers, said Mark Silverstein, HuffPost’s head of business development and monetization.
The full redesign afforded HuffPost an opportunity to pare down the list of ad tech partners employed by the site, which should speed up performance, said Mr. Silverstein.
HuffPost has undergone a full site redesign with mobile in mind.
Photo:
HuffPost
In addition to running a shorter list of ad versions, HuffPost is experimenting with moving around ads and content, including putting editorial posts on the far right of its pages—real estate that is typically claimed by ads. It is part of an effort to fight consumers’ conditioning to turn a blind eye to banner ads, Mr. Sliverstein explained.
HuffPost reached over 78 million unique visitors in the U.S. in March, down from about 82 million during the same month a year earlier, according to comScore. The site had almost 94 million users in November during the height of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Overall, HuffPo Media Group, which also includes AOL News, ranked seventh in March in the U.S. in comScore’s news and information category.
When Ms. Huffington created the digital-only news outlet more than a decade ago, it was envisioned as a liberal answer to the Drudge Report and gained notoriety as a news aggregator and a blogging platform where most writers weren’t paid.
It was acquired by AOL in 2011 for $315 million, and Ms. Huffington’s future with the site became somewhat unclear in the wake of Verizon’s acquisition of AOL in 2015. Then in August 2016, Ms. Huffington announced she was leaving to focus on her new startup, Thrive Global, a health and wellness site.
For her part, Ms. Huffington said she fully endorsed the name tweak and redesign, noting that many of publication’s social channels and its mobile app already carried the “HuffPost” brand.
“As the world moves further and further away from desktop toward social and mobile, it makes perfect sense to unify the branding,” she said. “For HuffPost to remain strong it has to constantly evolve.”
Write to Mike Shields at mike.shields@wsj.com
