Friday, 5 June 2015

Bidness Tech - Huffington Post's Future At Stake With AOL and Verizon's merger



Verizon's acquisition of AOL has blurred the future of Huffington Post.

Since the time, Verizon Communications Inc. has announced that the company is acquiring AOL Inc. the future of the Huffington Post owned by AOL is now at stake. AOL was actually acquired by Verizon so that they could boost their advertisement platform by using the advertisement technology of AOL. So now one is merely worried about Huffington post as it does not really benefit Verizon and its work equation.

Huffington Post is a new website that was founded and governed by Arianna Huffington actually got several acquisition offers by various investors, media organization and venture capitalist. According to sources familiar with the issue who discussed this matter with the New York Times, the valuation of the platform denotes a worth of $1 billion.

According to sources, the list of buyers who are willing to acquire the company comprise of media firms that are operational in Europe, this includes Axel Springer, Sean Parker, Le Monde along with the founder of a private equity company General Atlantic and Napster.

Ms. Huffington is an independent lady having the expertise to govern the company on her own. So the question here arises whether she will actually be comfortable to work under a completely new management. The New York Times has been successful in acquiring a memo that Ms. Huffington wrote to the management expressing her futuristic and ambitious plans for the news platform. She wishes to work on the video operations unit of the website along with bolstering the unpaid blogger platform, focus on original content and modify the lifestyle and comic offerings.

However, the contract Ms. Huffingto n signed recently has expired and so far no renewal has been done. This also indicates that Ms. Huffington will no longer play her part in Huffington post under the new management.

On May 12 a major revelation was made by Verizon Communication where it said that the company will be acquiring AOL for $50 per stock that resulted in a total worth of the company compounding to $4.4 billion. The company claimed that the reason behind acquiring AOL was to push in growth via investments in its video and digital segment. The company is expected to use the top video strategy that will boost the company’s LTE wireless video.

AOL was successful in acquiring Huffington Post in FY11 for $315 million. The web-based platform lost some big names in the world of journalism since they thought that they were being demoralized. Along with this several big names that managed the platform have bid farewell to the company.

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