HuffPo nears NYTimes web traffic
The Huffington Post is on track to top the New York Times in web traffic this year.
HuffPo had 13m unique users in March, nearing the NYTimes.com traffic in March at 16.6m. HuffPo’s traffic is up 94% over the same period last year, according to Nielsen Online.
The website, which recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, has grown from a small collection of celebrity bloggers to an online empire, with 70 paid reporters and editors and over 6,000 bloggers writing for free.
In fact, the website has grown so fast, HuffPo’s ad sales can hardly keep up, as profitability remains elusive. However, co-founder Arianna Huffington told the Associated Press that she is “completely sure” the site will be in the black by the end of the year.
HuffPo’s success is largely derived from its mastery of aggregation and social networking, integrating its stories with Twitter and Facebook. CEO Eric Hippeau said there were 2.3m comments posted on the website in March, “which is a lot of different opinions.”
Media analyst Ken Doctor told AP that HuffPo succeeds because it simply understands how the web works: “They understand the multiplier effect on the web — how you can generate and multiply traffic by using the vitality of the web.”
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