News of The Huffington Post’s sale to AOL for $315m was interesting for the details it revealed of The Post’s advertising revenue. The Financial Times revealed that HuffPost (let’s be nice to it and call it by its cuddly friendly name) has some 25 million unique users per month, and has a total advertising revenue last year of $30m. Assuming those monthly unique users are the regular visitors to the site, my arithmetic tells me that each unique user is worth $1.20 per year.
What kind of advertising generates this revenue? HuffPost doesn’t charge for content. I reckoned therefore the advertising would be very prominent on the site. I browsed the pages to see how big the adverts were. Interestingly, the adverts were few and far between. There were none on the home page, as far as I could see, which was difficult because Huffpost appears to have the longest home page of any website in the world. Perhaps this is a web-based definition of “front-page news”. I didn’t see any adverts on the first five pages I looked at. Only on the sixth page did I find an advert, and a rather unassuming one it was too. It was a small piece of “sponsor-generated content”, featuring “Top Five Travel Apps for BlackBerry® Smartphones”, and looking for all the world like any other content on the site – slightly hip, slightly street-savvy, but resolutely down-market. There was even space for comments, although nobody had commented. The advert appeared alongside a blog post on “Which Airline Has The Hottest Flight Attendants”, a report suitably enhanced by a photo helpfully provided by Virgin Atlantic (guess which airline has the hottest flight attendants). That article generated 442 comments, which made it (in my very small survey of six pages) one of the most popular on the site.
Perhaps the moral is, therefore, keep the adverts discreet, make sure they have an editorial feel, and keep a finger on the popular pulse, and then your content can earn substantial sums in advertising revenue alongside it. Unfortunately, medium-traffic sites, with around 30,000 unique users per month shouldn’t start thinking they have hit the jackpot. A revenue of $36,000 (£22,000) wouldn’t even pay for one staff member. Little wonder that Huffpost made more money from its sale than it most likely would have done from the site’s inherent profitability.
