Research Paper Undergraduate 881 words

News and the Huffington Post

Last reviewed: June 10, 2014 ~5 min read

Financial Leadership

Arianna Huffington is known as a leader within the world of politics. She began her career utilizing the connections she developed when she was married to Michael Huffington. This was used as a platform for her express shifting political views at different points in time. In general, her acceptance of conservative and liberal views is what helped her to reach out to a larger amount of readers. This allowed her to build a following and start the Huffington Post for expressing these insights. During this process, she had complete creative and financial control of the web site. This increased its popularity and it was subsequently sold to AOL for $135 million in 2009. Huffington retained control of the entity and the topics that were discussed. To fully understand her influences requires, carefully focusing on the financial impact of Huffington on the organization. Together, these elements will illustrate the kind of leadership style she is embracing.

The Financial Impact of Arianna Huffington on the Huffington Post

Arianna Huffington launched the Huffington Post in 2005. It was originally started as a blog to inform readers about liberal ideas and the impact key issues are having on variety of stakeholders. At the same time, she wanted to emphasize certain conservative ideas from her philosophy. This was achieved through supporting various economic policies in favor of select concepts (i.e. taxation and government spending). The combination of these factors created a unique environment, which reached out to individuals, who are considered to be independent and free thinkers. The basic strategy, was for the blog to become a way of talking about these issues from a unique perspective. ("Arianna Huffington," 2014)

Since this time, the web site has evolved from being a blog that was based on ideology to one which emphasized liberal and conservative ideals. These shifts became more pronounced with various specials which are designed to reach out to readers (such as: the Drudge Report). This is a conservative article that discusses issues like politics, economics and culture / society. The idea is to provide alternative perspectives on the news, by looking at specific viewpoints and how this is shaping the political debate. (Dunlop, 2014)

These techniques have enabled the web site to be ranked as one of the 15 most popular on the Internet. While at the same time, it increased the prominence of Arianna Huffington with her being named among the top 40 influential women. These effects are directly related to the leadership and vision she provided. (Dunlop, 2014)

The basic model is focused on providing traffic with free content and illustrating the various products / services of affiliates through a number of avenues. The most notable include: banner advertising, pay per click marketing, affiliate sales and CPM impression. The combination of these avenues allow the company to increase its revenues and traffic. This is resulting in the site realizing higher earnings in the process. (Dunlop, 2014)

The effects of these strategies are to encourage the site to expand the types of content they are delivering to other news organizations. The only difference, is the articles are directed as at specific conservative or liberal audiences. This has enabled the site to become one of the top news destinations. (Pulley, 2010)

A good example of this can be seen in the below chart. It is comparing the total amount of visitors in contrast with other news related sites.

Huffington Post vs. Top News Sites