Huffington Post

History

In 2011, the site began the strategy of crafting search-engine optimized (SEO) stories and headlines based around trending keywords, such as "What Time Is the Super Bowl?" In January 2011, the website received 35% of its traffic from web search engines (SEOs), compared to 20% at CNN. This strategy appealed to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who tried to implement similar SEO-driven journalism practices at AOL. In March 2011, AOL acquired The Huffington Post for US$315 million. As part of the deal, Huffington became president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post as well as of AOL properties Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater (now subpage on the HuffPost Entertainment subpage), AOL Music, AOL Latino (now HuffPost Voices), AutoBlog, Patch, and StyleList. Folded into Huffington Post were AOL Black Voices, which was established in 1995 as Blackvoices.com, and AOL Latino, Impact (launched in 2010 as a partnership between Huffington Post and Causecast), Women, Teen, College, Religion, and the Spanish-language Voces (en español). The Voices brand was expanded in September 2011 with the launch of Gay Voices, dedicated to LGBT-relevant articles. Former CEO Eric Hippeau left the company.