HuffPost went from a 2005 startup to a Pulitzer and a $315 million sale
Launched on May 9, 2005 by Jonah Peretti, Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Andrew Breitbart, The Huffington Post sold to AOL for $315 million six years later. In 2012 it became the first commercially run American digital media outlet to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Early money came from SoftBank Capital and Greycroft, with a $5 million round in August 2006, and from Oak Investment Partners, which put in $25 million in December 2008 at a $100 million valuation. Growth leaned heavily on search engines, with stories and headlines built around trending phrases such as What Time Is the Super Bowl? By January 2011, 35 percent of its traffic came from search, against 20 percent for CNN.
AOL bought the site in March 2011 and made Huffington editor-in-chief across a clutch of AOL properties including Engadget, TechCrunch and MapQuest. In June 2011 its traffic overtook NYTimes.com, and by that December it drew 36.2 million unique visitors. HuffPost Live, an online video channel, followed in August 2012.
Ownership kept shifting. Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion in June 2015; Huffington left, Lydia Polgreen took over in December 2016, and the site renamed itself HuffPost in April 2017. BuzzFeed, run by Peretti, acquired it for stock in February 2021, then cut 47 HuffPost staff in the US and closed HuffPost Canada. Danielle Belton became editor-in-chief that April, and after BuzzFeed News shut in 2023, BuzzFeed channelled its news ambitions into HuffPost.
Its sprawling contributor network ran from the launch until January 2018. In January 2025 the site introduced a freemium model with a paid ad-free version, when it had 60 million monthly global visitors, but by July 2025 traffic had fallen 40 percent as Google's AI Overviews diverted readers.
Source: HuffPost
