Huffington Deal Raises Question: What Site Will Be Sold Next?

By EVELYN M. RUSLI

In agreeing to buy The Huffington Post for $315 million, AOL is putting what appears to be a significant premium on the ability to attract and build a community of readers.

Yet as more and more advertising dollars flow to the Web and to mobile devices, demand for popular and prolific online content producers like The Huffington Post, is rising. The market for online advertising is expected to increase 14 percent, to $51.9 billion, this year, according to the research firm Borrell Associates.

With that kind of growth, the deal for The Huffington Post is expected to raise the bar for other independent online media companies whose audiences have surged with the help of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Speculation is now turning to what prices others could fetch should they ever go on the block. Among the biggest is Gawker Media, home to a collection of popular sites, such as its flagship property and technology blog, Gizmodo, which attracts about 19 million users a month, according to comScore. Glam Media, a group of beauty and fashion sites geared toward women, boasts 87.8 million visitors a month.

The three-year-old Business Insider, something akin to a business version of The Huffington Post, with its mix of breaking original content and aggregation, attracts 3.5 million visitors a month, comScore says. And companies like AOL and Yahoo have been on the prowl for content providers.

“Right now, the macroeconomic turnaround and the explosive growth in mobile, is causing Internet companies to accelerate their investments and there’s a question of what is content,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Securities. “Companies like AOL and Yahoo are in a battle to make themselves relevant.”

For that reason, analysts barely blinked at a valuation for The Huffington Post that by most measures was a lofty one. The price is 6.3 times The Huffington Post’s projected revenue of more than $50 million for this year. That’s more expensive than the $25 million AOL paid last September to acquire TechCrunch, which claims to generate about $10 million in annual revenues.

If one uses AOL’s projections for revenue growth and costs savings in 2012, the price for The Huffington Post comes to 10 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization or Ebitda, wrote Mark S. Mahaney, an analyst with Citigroup. “Not cheap, but not outrageous for a relatively high quality asset with strong top-line growth, current profitability and margin expansion potential,” he wrote.

Read the entire issue here: www.NYTimes.com

Next is NOW: Young, Black and Fabulous

Natasha Eubanks: YBF Creator Chosen for Black Enterprise's 'Next Is Now' Cover Story
By Bridget Bland

Natasha Eubanks, founder and CEO of the popular black celebrity blog Young Black and Fabulous -- more commonly known as TheYBF.com -- joins three other young entrepreneurs on the cover of the January 2010 issue of Black Enterprise magazine.

The monthly black business periodical chose to profile its "BE Nexters" -- young professionals all under 35 -- making moves in their respective fields. Eubanks, who launched her blog in 2005 after noticing a lack of African Americans featured on gossip sites, had aspirations of being a lawyer.

"I didn't even really know what a blog was when I started YBF. I was just playing around the 'net, filling my boredom of my hostess job at the Olive Garden and waiting on [law] school to start," she shared.

In her feature story for BE, the former aspiring lobbyist revealed how her parents discouraged her from abandoning her Loyola Law School endeavors.

"My mom was like, 'Oh, no, no, no, there's no money in that. ...My parents thought it was a really bad move."

But against her parent's urgings, she decided to try it anyway.

To read the entire story, go to:

AOL Black Voices

Ex-Foster Child Now $1 Million Scholar

AOL News

Derrius Quarles cuts a sleek figure on the Morehouse College campus in Atlanta, GA. The 19-year-old freshman favors tailored suits, reported the Chicago Tribune, and hands out business cards emblazoned with the words "Student/Entrepreneur/Leader." But his route to higher education has been a rocky one, said the paper. His father was stabbed to death when Quarles was four, while his mother struggled with drug addiction.

He spent the rest of his childhood with relatives or in foster homes, the Tribune reported. At times he and his older brother would steal bread and snacks from nearby convenience stores. And by the time he turned 17, Quarles was living on his own. Yet he was determined to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, the Tribune said. "I've had people tell me that I ain't never gonna be s---," he told the paper. "That's not a scratch, that cuts deep. After so many people put me down, I said, 'I'm gonna show you.'" To that end, Quarles pushed himself to the limit when he enrolled in Chicago's Kenwood Academy High School. Not only was he earning straight A's by his junior year -- he also scoured the Web for information about scholarships.

His efforts paid major dividends, said the Tribune. Quarles won more than $1 million in scholarship offers, a rare feat accomplished by only about a dozen students nationwide each year. Along with his full ride at Morehouse, Quarles won a Gates Millennium Scholarship worth $160,000 and two others worth $20,000 each. As for his ambitions, Quarles is just getting started, reported the paper. He hopes to attend medical school, set up a tutoring program for low-income students in Chicago, get involved in public-health policy, and eventually become U.S. surgeon general. "I have no time to play around," he told the Tribune. He added: "I want to make a difference. I want to show people that I can be all those things people said I could never be."
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