What's a blog worth? Try $100 million. That's the prevailing wisdom regarding The Huffington Post, a political blog-cum-Internet newspaper that has proved popular with liberal voters.
This week, the blogger announced $25 million in new funding that, according to sources quoted by The Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher, values the firm at a little "south of $100 million." If correct, it's a coup for the site, albeit an unsurprising one.
Consider the timing. Questions linger over the short-term health of online advertising, which could impede Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) quest to become a new media mogul. Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), meanwhile, denied showing interest in Yahoo!'s search business, and Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) killed its Alexa search engine. Taken together, these reports suggest there could be fewer opportunities to monetize blogs in the not-too-distant future.
Even so, The Huffington Post's valuation appears reasonable, given what the Web's social superstars -- Facebook and recession-proof Twitter -- fetch today:
|
Company
|
Employees
|
Valuation*
|
Value Per Employee*
|
|
The Huffington Post
|
46
|
$100
|
$2.17
|
|
Twitter
|
30
|
$150
|
$5.00
|
|
Facebook
|
700
|
$3,750
|
$5.36
|
Sources: Press reports, TMF estimates.
*In millions.
All three are news aggregators in some form but, of them, only the Post specializes in creating content. How does the site stack up against old-media rivals? Pretty well, I'd say:
|
Company
|
Employees
|
Market Cap*
|
Value Per Employee
|
|
Lee Enterprises
|
8,100
|
$37.4
|
$4,617
|
|
Journal Communications (NYSE: JRN)
|
3,750
|
$120.97
|
$32,258
|
|
McClatchy (NYSE: MNI)
|
14,307
|
$161.57
|
$11,293
|
|
New York Times (NYSE: NYT)
|
10,231
|
$1,050
|
$102,629
|
|
Gannett (NYSE: GCI)
|
46,100
|
$1,950
|
$42,299
|
Sources: Capital IQ, Yahoo! Finance, TMF estimates.
*In millions. Please note that here, value per employee is not in millions.
Color me unsurprised. Old media isn't as crucial as it once was. Twenty years ago, as a young sportswriter, I was stringing together awful clips in exchange for soup money. Now I write for soup and sandwich money for a family of five.
And slow, stodgy, just-the-facts old media is being replaced by real-time, edgy, sometimes erroneous, yet increasingly valuable new media -- including outlets like The Huffington Post and (ahem) The Motley Fool.
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