An interesting article comparing the success and pathways of the Daily Beast’s Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington.
The same day that Huffington’s $315 million deal with AOL was announced,Media Week’s Brian Morrissey reported that Tina Brown’s merged Newsweek-Daily Beast had yet to find a revenue model to match its glamorous masthead.
According to comScore, The Daily Beast drew 2.9 million visitors in December, up only slightly from the same month a year before. Newsweek had traditionally done better, but its audience has shrunk and its traffic deal with MSNBC.com was dissolved, leaving the NewsBeast with a combined audience of about 5.2 million.
Compare that with the Huffington Post’s reported 25 million unique monthly visitors – a figure rivaling the traffic of the New York Times website – and it becomes clear that comparing Brown’s and Huffington’s sitesis like comparing apples and oranges.
Yes, both are middle-aged, English-educated women whose personal brands are in some ways greater than the brands that they created. And yes, they have been friends for 30 years.
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“Ms. Huffington has thousands of raucous voices on her site, many of them emanating from her high-profile friends, as well as large-scale aggregation of news from around the web. Ms. Brown’s formula is more like that of a magazine – rather than compile mounds of material and offer a platform to almost anyone with a laptop, she chooses what she likes.”
Yes, and even some whose names Huffington used without permission. Then there was the HuffPo blogger who carried out an incestuous affair with his daughter. Then there were all the stories about plagiarism.
Huffington’s business model consisted of using her famous friends whereas Brown’s did not. Any business model trading on the fame of the Hollywood set will survive such scandals as the ones linked above.
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