Just when you thought the excitement of a tense Super Bowl and an all new episode of Glee were all you could handle for one Sunday, AOL brought it to the next level by announcing their acquisition of The Huffington Post for $315 million late last night. The merger would place Ariana Huffington as the editor-in-chief of all of AOL’s content sites. Yes, that includes TechCrunch, which means that Ariana Huffington is now Michael Arrington’s boss. Don’t worry, I’ve got enough popcorn for all of us to share.
Ariana’s posted a long history of how the merger came about on The Huffington Post, but basically it was due to a meeting her and AOL CEO last November:
After that November panel, Tim and I chatted briefly and arranged to see each other the next day. At that meeting, we talked not just about what our two companies were doing, but about the larger trends we saw happening online and in our world. I laid out my vision for the expansion of The Huffington Post, and he laid out his vision for AOL. We were practically finishing each other’s sentences.
So the meeting pretty much went like this:
It’ll be interesting to see whether this move works out for both companies in the long run. On the surface it seems like a good move if AOL’s goal is to become more relevant in the face of declining dial-up customer business.(yeah, we’re surprised that people are still paying AOL subscription fees too.) With TechCrunch, Engadget, The Huffington Post, and many other large sites under its belt, it’ll be hard to avoid at least reading an AOL site if you’re an avid content consumer. Investors didn’t seem to be swayed much by the merger, as AOL stock prices were down today slightly.
Something else to keep an eye on is how and if Ariana Huffington will still institute “The AOL Way” with all of the content sites reporting to her now. Huffington has developed a sort of “blogger-friendly” reputation in terms of letting them produce content that they are passionate about, while”The AOL Way” pretty much pushes that aside in favor of grabbing more traffic.
Update: The LA Times is reporting that TechCrunch supposedly did not receive the memo of the acquisition last night:
“They don’t trust us with anything,” wrote Erick Schonfeld, co-editor at TechCrunch.
Ouch.
Plus, Armstrong and Huffington gave an exclusive interview announcing the merger to All Things D, a Wall Street Journal property. Why wouldn’t they give the scoop to one of their own tech site behemoths, TechCrunch or Engadget? Awkward…
Kara Swisher from All Things D interviewed Huffington and Armstrong Super Bowl Sunday here:
