Hitwise Intelligence - Tim Lovitt - AP
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Huffpo Australia
July 29, 2011
Announced recently at the Cannes Lions, the Huffington Post is soon to be launching an outpost in Australia.
This seemed a little strange to us here – Australia is small in comparison to the US, we have a range of media options available and have well resourced independent players. The recent launch of The Conversation adds further to the mix, providing a standalone platform for academic publishing.
Things started to make sense however when we took a look at HuffPo’s rankings – they’re number 1, and have been for every month bar two in the last year.
More incredibly, they’re seeing almost a million Australian visits a month: almost 5% of our population!
In this light the announcement doesn’t seem so strange after all — a cashed up offshore player (HuffPo was bought for US$315m by AOL earlier this year) has noted strong interest and decided to realise an opportunity for growth. In the three years to June 2011, HuffPo increased their Australian market share of the Lifestyle – Politics category from less than 5% to more than 20%. In fact, they're the single largest site in the category by visitation.
Having ranked ranked first in Lifestyle – Politics for ten out of the last twelve months, not to mention regularly pulling 900,000+ visits, Huffington Post is most definitely of interest to Australians, with us now of interest to AOL as a result.
Makes sense to us.
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Posted by Tim Lovitt at 01:06 PM
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In Categories Media | Politics | Publishing