All not well in AOL land? I thought the attraction of Huffington was the concept of getting contributors to work for free; how can that be bad for the bottom line? That said, these are not good signs. I wonder about the future of Tech Crunch and Engadget, although I thought Tech Crunch was already slipping a little.
The Implosion of the Huffington Post-AOL Merger
The question for AOL shareholders is whether the financial solvency of their company will fall casualty to Huffington's latest, and perhaps messiest, attempt at reshaping the world to her own desires. If the volume and ferocity of the charges against the publisher are anything to go by, and if you can set aside that they come from a notoriously thin skinned professional caste, that might just be the case. Here's the rundown of the allegations:
- Arianna "subverted the wishes of her board" in selling the Huffington Post to AOL, after two board members insisted HuffPo could go public for more than three times what AOL paid. "AOL... represented a platform and partner for Arianna to greatly accelerate her ambitions," investor Fred Harman told Forbes. "Nothing was going to stand in the way."
- Arianna is a selfish disaster of a manager. As former HuffPo chief revenue officer Greg Coleman told Forbes of the AOL deal, "she wanted three things: a big bag of gold, a big fat contract, which she deserved, and … unilateral decision making over her world. And that is where you're going to have some problems... Arianna's a world-class politician, a world-class media maven and a genius at p.r., but she's not an experienced manager." Her underlings would seem to agree; one told Business Insider she was "unpredictable" and "unsteady," adding, "Several editors are racing to close book deals to be write the 'Devil Wear's Prada' of the digital age."
- All websites must bear her name. Business Insider's source points out that standalone AOL websites with their own domain names are all being converted into directories on HuffPo, which in many cases is demonstrably true. "No one thinks consolidating to huffingtonpost.com is a good idea from a consumer or an advertiser perspective, but no one will stop Arianna."
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