Arianna Huffington has been admired for her work for quite some time. Since she has told the Huffington Post to AOL, it comes as no surprise that there might be more to this woman than meets the eye.
As a media mogul in what is still considered by some to be a man’s world, Business Insider has decided to take a look at her success.
Arianna co-founded the Huffington Post in 2005 and built it into a profitable $30 million business over six years. In the process, she helped create 200+ jobs, raise $35+ million of capital, and build a nationally recognized brand. She also invented a whole new kind of media business, one built from the ground up to take advantage of the digital medium, one that cleaned the clocks of dozens of richer, more powerful, and better-branded competitors. Along the way, Arianna also fought off a steady fusillade of griping and naysaying from those who dismissed her ideas as trash, theft, and idiocy, eventually overcoming these criticisms and building Huffington Post into an establishment brand.
With the sale of Huffington Post, Arianna becomes one of the first digital-media entrepreneurs to cash in on a scale that will even raise eyebrows in the mainstream-media-mogul community. $300 million in cash is not the sale of a “blog” for what amounts to couch change for a big media company. It’s the sale of a major media business–in an industry in which most pundits have confidently asserted that it’s impossible to make money. As is also traditional in the media-mogul world, the benefits of this success also accrued to Arianna personally: One analyst estimates that she made $100 million on the sale.
Screenshot from Huffington Post