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SUNDAY, JULY 5, 2009

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HuffPo Worth $200M? Em, More Like $2M

(Newser Summary) – The Huffington Post stunned the media world when it scooped up $25 million last month from Oak Investment Partners for an undisclosed stake, but industry tongue-waggers who put the uberblog's value between $100 million and $200 million are full of it, writes Simon Dumenco in AdAge. To "anybody with basic math skills and a halfway-decent bullshit detector" this is all just dot-com overvaluation again, he writes—by his reckoning, HuffPo is worth about $2 million.

Dumenco’s $2 million figure comes from comparing HuffPo to Salon, a comparable website which IPO’d in 1999 at about $9 a share. The 2 million outstanding shares of Salon now cost 35 cents, giving Salon a market value of $700,000. HuffPo has almost four times the traffic of Salon, but less revenue, so Dumenco gives HuffPo roughly three times Salon’s value.
Source: Advertising Age

More about:  media • journalism • venture capital • American media • Huffington Post • new media • visitors

The Salon.com logo.
The Salon.com logo.   (Salon.com)
Arianna Huffington arrives at the premiere of
Arianna Huffington arrives at the premiere of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2007.   (AP Photo/ Matt Sayles)
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The media are slowly beginning to realize that just because some VC shelled out $1 million for a 1% stake of a start-up, that doesn't mean that the start-up is worth $100 million.
- Simon Dumenco

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