I just heard this morning that the Huffington Post was bought out by (merged with) AOL. The great thing about this, is that it really shows how valuable writing great content can be. It is great that Arianna Huffington was able to start Huffington Post in 2005 and in 2011 sell it for $315,000,000. That's a lot of dough.

Sadly though AOL doesn't tend to be the best online company to partner with in my mind. I think they offer a lot of shoddy products/services. They are however excellent marketers from day one. You remember all the floppy discs and cd roms they sent out through the '90's. This really has made them huge and they continue to buy up all the companies they can to grow their huge company.

It will be interesting to see where AOL takes Huffington. Will things go south? I have seen this many times over the years with software companies and the like. I'm still pissed at Adobe for dropping GoLive web development software once they bought macromedia, trying to replace it with Dreamweaver (good software for programmers, poor for designers).

Anyhow, I have only read a few articles on Huffington, but they run in the circles with all the big dogs of online inbound marketing experts, so I was very familiar with them or at least their name. I think they were more focused on the women's market which is a big reason AOL is going after them. Women are buyers and big influencers to buying so this is a great avenue to reach these buyers through advertising.

Will AOL be able to keep up the quality reporting that the pre-AOL Huffington Post used to deliver? Only time will tell. Again, although I didn't read much on the Huffington site, I respected them for figuring out how to create a digital news medium in a time when newspapers of the past seem to be struggling more and more each day. It seems as though this independent has now been bought up by the big media guys and I am doubting things will be the same.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think this is a good thing for Huffington's readers? Do you think this is a good thing for the digital news industry? Do you think this is a good thing for proving the value of blogging? Will the previous brand remain as strong as it once was?