Arianna Rules

Well she rules a publishing empire now. Most people saw that AOL is buying Huffington Post for over $300 million. Not bad for a six year old business. I was watching these pundits on TV that were implying she wasn't up to the task. I mean really - run the publishing site for AOL???

The woman started a website in 2005 and is selling it for $315 million. How many of those nay saying pundits can say the same thing. None. You don't do that by accident. It isn't that she just got lucky. She built a business that someone was willing to pay big money for.

It's also interesting that AOL, the cutting edge internet brand - first to the dial up internet is now the old established media company. Stephanie Sandberg, CMO of SSA & CO. said, "Huffington Post is the AOL of the Time Warner deal with AOL from 2000...because as Shira Ovide points out in WSJ, Arianna's taking over the content, which means she's basically in charge."

However, that deal didn't work out so well. Time Warner lost millions and had to spin AOL back off because the company was failing. Now AOL is desperate and spends 40% of its cash on HuffPo. Only time will tell if it will work.

But the internet battle for the "go to website" is heating up with AOL/HuffPo, Apple's The Daily, Google and Yahoo's continuation of its content expansion. I'm starting to think it comes down to pepsi and coke.

HuffPo and ......