AOL Completes Huffington Post Acquisition

AOL has announced that it has already completed the acquisition of The Huffington Post, about one month after it was revealed. The deal was not challenged by regulators, as expected, and has now been closed. Arianna Huffington, creator of the Huffington post, will be an AOL President and Editor In Chief.

"AOL announced today that it has closed its acquisition of The Huffington Post, the influential and rapidly growing news and opinion site with over 27 million unique monthly US visitors," the company announced.

"AOL will integrate The Huffington Post with all AOL Media and AOL Local properties to create the Huffington Post Media Group, a leading source of news, opinion, entertainment, community, and digital information," it added.

"Arianna Huffington will lead the overall editorial direction of the new group as President and Editor-in-Chief," AOL continued.

The company first announced its intentions to buy The Huffington Post in early February. AOL paid $315 million for the site.

The move fits in with AOL's overall strategy to focus on content creation. It has been ramping up internal efforts to push out more editorial content than before and video has taken a significant importance in the past months.

AOL has also been making a few acquisitions of media properties, it bought the TechCrunch technology blog last year along with several other, smaller companies.

Content is the way going forward for AOL, it wants to be one of major content creators online. Already it owns quite a few popular blogs and other web destinations. The AOL homepage, though not as popular as it once was, can still drive a lot of traffic to the properties featured there.

The Huffington Post is already one of the biggest online destinations for news, in the US, and its editorial philosophy, quantity over quality, aligns itself well to AOL's.

"Through this acquisition, AOL is accelerating its strategy to deliver a scaled and differentiated array of premium news, analysis, and entertainment produced by thousands of writers, editors, reporters, and videographers around the globe. The combined entity will have a user base of 117 million unique visitors a month in the United States and 253 million around the world," AOL boasts.