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Here's How BuzzFeed and HuffPost Really Stack Up

This article is more than 9 years old.

BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post make for an easy comparison, sharing, as they do, some co-founders and a viral content strategy built around a high-low mix, among other commonalities. But in the days since Buzzfeed raised $50 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, giving it a reported valuation of $850 million, some of the many inevitable comparisons have skewed toward the inane.

Worst was Michael Wolff's in USA Today, where he declared that the parallel trajectories of BuzzFeed and HuffPost "represent a curious experiment in which you can see the course of the same company both having been sold and of having not been sold....The proposition of both companies is to maximize a digital publishing model within the clear limitations of digital publishing: that is, ad rates remain low and continue to drop, so eyeballs need to go up."

As evidence that BuzzFeed is just a sort of post-inflationary HuffPost, Wolff cited some numbers:

When it was sold, The Huffington Post had 30 million unique visitors, derived from Peretti's legendary traffic-generating strategies, and was taking in about $30 million a year. It now is reported to have about 50 million uniques and to have about $60 million to $80 million in sales. BuzzFeed, continuing on with Peretti's hyper-traffic approach, is up to nearly 150 million unique monthly visitors, and it is reported to have brought in $50 million last year. It's projecting $120 million this year (approximately the revenue of a million-circulation monthly magazine). Neither company has much, if any, profit.

One problem with this comparison: It's totally spurious, drawing from disparate sets of metrics and out-of-date estimates. For starters, BuzzFeed doesn't have three times the audience of HuffPost. That 150 million uniques figure is based on internal measurement, and internal stats are almost always higher than the ones produced by measurement firms like comScore . HuffPost's internal figure for monthly unique visitors is 207 million.

Plus ca change: Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An apples-to-apples comparison using comScore data yields a similar picture: In July, HuffPost had a U.S. multiplatform audience of 95 million, versus 69 million for BuzzFeed. (Of course, HuffPost's traffic gets a big bump from heavy promotion on AOL .com, but that's just one more way of saying these comparisons are always somewhat misleading.)

As for the claim that HuffPost has $60 million to $80 million in revenues (versus a projected 2014 take of $120 million for BuzzFeed), it's not clear where that range comes from, but it's somewhat lower than what analysts say. Jefferies pegged HuffPost's revenues for last year at $360 million while CitiGroup's Mark May says it was $100 million.  AOL doesn't break out HuffPost's contribution, but sources say that its sales have more than doubled since the acquisition, when it was projecting 2011 revenue of $60 million. That would yield a top line about equal to BuzzFeed's.

Does that mean HuffPost is winning, since it has a bigger audience? Or is it losing, since it's not monetizing its bigger audience as intensively? Or did it lose years ago by selling itself too cheaply? Or does that mean AOL actually won by getting a good deal?

Ask Arianna Huffington and she'll tell you she doesn't care, as long as whoever is making the comparisons isn't using bogus math.  Via email, she says:

The media loves to perpetuate a narrative of competition… For many years, they tried to do it with the Daily Beast and Tina Brown and HuffPost and me. Now it’s BuzzFeed and HuffPost. The truth is that there are going to be more and more great digital media players, and I personally love Jonah and Ben and what they’re doing with BuzzFeed. I just wish the media would abandon the competitive narrative and instead present the facts with accurate and consistent numbers.