Dennis K. Berman, the then-business editor at The Wall Street Journal, questioned The Huffington Post's bandied-about valuation of $1 billion in June of 2015. It seemed curious in Berman's view for a company that had so consistently failed to generate a profit to make it to the tenth digit when the valuation discussions began. With 214 million monthly readers at the time and around $168 million revenue, The Huffington Post was clearly doing many things well. There are few places that boast that degree of traffic. But for some reason, profits were nowhere to be found. And that becomes all the more mysterious, in the case of The Huffington Post, when it's the publication that so many of America's old-school newspaper columnists curse to the high heavens, claiming that Arianna Huffington destroyed their profession by doing something quite shocking, at least at the time: getting people to write for free.
Do Profits Matter in Digital Journalism?
