Huffington Post & Politico Earned Huge Profits In 2009

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Are media models like Politico and the Huffington Post overhyped?











Huffington Post and Politico Set To Make Huge 2009 Profits





As we entered 2010, most news organizations were still battling declining revenues. However, a few online Journalists are holding out against the downturn.

According to recent figures, Politico and the Huffington Post both ended 2009 in the black.

Experts estimate that The Huffington Post earned revenues of $12m to $16m, and the Washington-based Politico might have exceeded $20m for the full calendar year 2009 according to figures of Paid Content.

On top of the good news, Huffington Post invested in jobs in 2009, increasing its staff from 49 to 89 full-time employees, with 11 of them devoted to producing original content according to the Los Angeles Times.

Industry sources estimate that the four-year-old Huffington Post has mushroomed into a media asset worth $100m to $200m. According to comScore, the Huffington Post pulled in about 9 million unique users in November and has grown 27% year-over-year – for comparison, NYTimes.com had 16.6 million unique visitors in the same month.

News website Politico was launched two years ago in combination with a free print edition of approximately 32,000 copies which run three days a week when Congress is in session.

The small, but mostly high-profile Editorial Staff now includes 77 employees. The site is estimated to reach about 7 million unique users a month, but Publisher Joseph Allbritton Communications says the majority of the revenues come from the print edition.

But how relevant are these numbers, really? Let's have a look.

Enter Rupert Murdoch. In fiscal 2009, News Corp's global newspaper operation is estimated to have generated $400m in operating income on $5.6bn in advertising and subscription revenues in fiscal 2009, which according to a Bernstein Research will continue to decline to nearly $300m in operating income on $5.5bn in revenues in fiscal 2010.

This is $100m less than 2009, but $300m operating income is still a lot of money. So, why is everybody making such a fuss about two small companies?

Politico and the Huffington Post may not be big in staff and revenue, but they are symbols of a changing media landscape that other companies might learn from – Yahoo, for example.

Yes, Yahoo is in the news business, as Yahoo News attracted 138 million global unique visitors in November 2009. That is not only far more unique users than the 16 million of NYTimes.com, but also more than CNN or Google News. In the US, Yahoo is the biggest news player.

According to a recent posting on Yahoo's jobs board, the company news plans to build a network of freelance writers and bloggers filing opinion and analysis articles that will be complemented with breaking news from AP and Reuters. Hence, the company is looking for an editor-in-chief to oversee a new opinion and politics section that will be revamped to satisfy readers' appetite for opinion pieces and political news.

So what does this tell us for 2010? For one thing, quality journalism clearly does play an important role in the new media landscape, and can pay for itself.

Also in 2010, more and more editorial jobs will be created outside traditional mainstream media, and this might even absorb some of the job cuts elsewhere if journalists are open to the challenge.




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Sources: Guardian.co.uk, Politico, Huffington Post, PaidContent, Digital Journal, Newscorp, MSNBC, Think Progress, Youtube, Google Maps