CNNMoney has obtained a copy of the Huffington Post's strategy for growth that founder Arianna Huffington writes will position the site to "dominate the industry."
The memo was sent last week to the top personnel at the site.
Huffington Post was included in Verizon's $4.4 billion purchase of AOL. The deal appears to leave the HuffPo's future in doubt because it is unclear whether Verizon intends to keep the site, allow it to continue with liberal leaning editorial policies unfettered, or try to sell the site.
The digital media industry and The Huffington Post are at an unprecedented inflection point. With a core mission of informing, inspiring, entertaining, and empowering audiences, HuffPost is positioned to grow and dominate the industry in the coming years.
For all the industry's rapid growth in the last decade, the game is still in the early innings. And the companies that will win the future are those with a proven ability to adapt to changes, seize new possibilities, and see around the corner. Digital media today is where the cable industry was in the mid-1980s. Distribution channels like mobile, social and OTT are being built out, and the market is about to get a lot bigger. Mobile is proving to be as disruptive to the industry as digital was to print.
Today, The Huffington Post is already at 214 MM UVs (comScore) and in 13 markets. Our ambition is to be the global leader in digital media -- in traffic, in influence, and in audience trust and engagement. By focusing on global, mobile and social, by scaling our technology and further opening our platform and by emphasizing our growth in video and multimedia, we will continue to build the leading global digital media company for the 21st century and beyond.
We are prioritizing growth in the following areas:
-- We have already successfully expanded globally to 13 markets (soon to be 17), and 50% of our audience now comes from outside the United States. HuffPost's general standing and influence will only accelerate and get stronger as we expand to new countries and new markets. We also plan on rolling out a franchise/licensing model for small and mid-sized markets in the future. We will continue building the world's first truly global digital newsroom, connecting our international editions through an expanded corps of translators and internationally focused editors.
-- By investing in video, we will dramatically grow video production and distribution across diverse formats for diverse audiences and platforms. Our key development areas are digital video, TV, film and community video.
-- By scaling our investment in technology and in our open platform we will support our growth from 100,000 bloggers to millions and double down on mobile blogging tools. We will continue to expand our blog platform beyond text by focusing our user-generated and community-driven content model around photo, video and audio.
-- As we are replacing AP, we will be building out our world-class global newsroom with additional editors, reporters and multimedia producers around the world, mobile and social-focused editors, international coverage, and interactive media, including games and puzzles.
--We will be scaling our major editorial initiative, "What's Working," doubling down on our coverage of people and communities doing amazing things, overcoming great odds and coming up with solutions to the very real challenges we face. Not only is our goal to reimagine journalism, but as the number one social publisher on Facebook, we've learned that these are the stories our audience is most interested in sharing.
-- In lifestyle, we are already the thought leader in health and wellness, helping people live the lives they want, not just the lives they settle for. We will expand our video offerings in this area and open up the platform for content from our audience, since we have only begun to tap into the potential of universal themes like happiness, work-life balance, stress reduction, and the science of well-being.
-- We are building a large and varied comedy and satire team with a focus on video and featuring a rapid response satire unit.
-- While most of HuffPost's growth will be organic, we will also seek out smart acquisitions and strategic investments (where we can act as an incubator for young, innovative companies) that will bring in top talent and cutting-edge technologies to help accelerate our goals.
