1. Huffington Post: College Edition
Secondary Market Research
Shelly de Greeve
Shelly_deGreeve@mba.berkeley.edu
Roland Gendron
Roland_Gendron@mba.berkeley.edu
Peter Hsu
Peter_Hsu@mba.berkeley.edu
Karlay Tan
Karlay_Tan@mba.berkeley.edu

2. Contents
• Company Background
• Demographics / Market Dynamics
• Deep Dive - College Newspapers Readership
• Industry Overview / Competitive Landscape

3. Company Background
• Online news aggregator and original content generator
• Founded in May 2005 by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and
Jonah Peretti
• Legal filings in Delaware
• Headquartered in New York City
• Privately owned by Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer
• Internet Publishing and Broadcasting: NAICS 519130 & SIC 27419909
• Website Pages include:
Politics Media Entertainment Sports Business
Living Style Green Technology World
Books/NYR Impact Video Blogger Comedy
City Guides: Chicago New York Denver Los Angeles
(2008) (6/2009) (9/2009) (12/2009)

4. Company Background
Source Employees Revenue
Huffington Post Employee Demographics
Alexa.com 250-1000 band $10 - $50m
according to LinkedIn:
Dun & Bradstreet 1 $85,000 – 51% male and 49% female
Huffington Post 98 listed Undisclosed – Median employee age of 28
LinkedIn.com 11-50 band not referenced – Top school representation from NYU,
Manta.com 20-49 band $5-$10m Columbia University and Graduate School
Yahoo! Finance 48 $4m of Journalism
Wikipedia.org 60 not referenced
According to Alexa.com, visitors over-index as:
– Female
– College Graduates
– Between the ages of 25 - 64
– Top school representation from NYU, Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism
– Without Children
– Browse from Work

5. Company Popularity & User Data
• 39,642 sites link in to the Huffington Post
• Daily traffic ranking over the past six months improved from 450 to
its current 136
• Over the past 3 months, it received 4.3-4.6 page views/user for a
total site visit of 5.4-5.8 minutes
• Within the site, guests visit:
• 99.1% - main site
• 00.4% - fundrace
• 00.3% - images
• 00.1% - blogger
• 00.0% - feeds, fundrace-origin, and other
• #1 blog on Technorati Top 100 blogs
• 55,000 followers on Twitter
• Almost 87,000 fans on Facebook
• Time Magazine placed it in the 25 best blogs of 2009

6. Company Ranking & Traffic
Patterns
Worldwide Ranking Global Search Popularity Site visits preceded by Site visits proceeded by
alexa.com Last Month – alexa.com upstream visits to: downstream visits to:
36 US 1 huffington post 21.00% Google 18.02% Google
100 Canada 2 walmart 6.64% Facebook 6.26% Facebook
166 South Africa 3 brittany murphy 5.20% Yahoo 4.30% Yahoo
212 Pakistan 4 jamie jungers 2.22% Twitter 2.49% NYTimes
240 South Korea 5 josyln james 1.90% NYTimes 2.44% YouTube
241 Australia 6 tiger woods 1.74% TMZ 2.25% Twitter
277 UK 7 avatar 1.74% YouTube 2.12% TMZ
406 Netherlands 8 huffington 1.60% People 1.51% People
471 India 9 loredana jolie 1.45% CNN 1.32% CNN
1176 Germany 10 jamiee grubbs 0.97% Wikipedia 1.02% Washington Post

7. Demographics
• College Edition targets young adults (18-24)
• Adults 18-24 comprise 13% of U. S. population; 18-34
includes 30% of U. S. population
• 40% of adults 18-24 are currently enrolled in college –
12 million potential readers and growing!
• College students spend an average of 18 hrs per week
online; 94% online daily.
• Graduates are increasingly retaining contact with their
alma mater
• Building brand loyalty amongst college students will
likely retain readership post graduation

8. Demographics – Population
• Ethnically diverse • Largely single
population group
• Hispanics, Blacks, and
Asians overrepresented
as percentage of overall
group population
• Whites declining as % of
overall group population
(-0.6% in 10 yrs)

9. Demographics - Growth and Segment
Internet Use
• College enrollment hits all-time high, fueled by community college surge
• Tied as top group of internet penetration at 93%

10. Demographics – Trends by Gender and Race
• As of October 2008, women
comprised 53% of all young
college students. (Census
Bureau)
• Whites are attending college
more than ever before
• Hispanics trend upward on
completing high school,
possible indicator of college
trends
• Blacks are declining in both
college and high school
graduation since 2007

11. Demographics – Online Behavior
• In the past year, the • Primary drivers of online
majority of college aged vs retail purchase include:
• 84% - Convenience
adults have not made
• 81% - Lower Prices
an online purchase • 54% - Sales Promotions
• 54% - TV Ad
• 39% - Print Ad
• 21% - Radio Ad
• Strong opportunity for
online sites to supplant
more expensive TV/print
ads

12. Online Deep Dive – College Internet Users
• 33% of college students spend >10hrs per week on-line, 5/15 top uses are news related
• Female students show slight edge in most news category activity outside sports and
weather

13. Demographics – Social Media Usage
• Heavy use of social media among college students creates a network effect for
both purchase decisions and viewing habits online
– The majority of college students have an active facebook account
– College students are overrepresented on twitter, underrepresented in Blogosphere
– Young adults value peer input in purchase decisions more than advertisements, print
or online. This tendency is more pronounced in young adults than in the overall
population.
SNS = Social Network Service

14. Current Marketing Opinion on Social Media (B2B)
• Despite the cultural phenomenon that Facebook and MySpace have become
in the past few years, 55% of top-brand CMOs said they’re not too interested in
incorporating social media into their campaigns.
• Early adopter strategic opportunity?

15. Deep Dive – College newspapers readership
• Despite declines in mainstream newspaper readership, college newspapers are an
integral part of students’ lives, with over three-quarters (76%) of them saying they
have read their college newspaper in the past month, 55% in the past week.
• The college newspaper provides students a wide range of information, including
where they seek out advertising information: Close to three-quarters (73%) of
readers say they look at the advertisements in their college paper.
• Campus news is top of mind, with 90% of those surveyed saying it’s important to
find out what’s happening within the campus environs.
• Some 44% state that campus newspaper advertising is also information they read
and seek out.
• Entertainment-related news, sports and current affairs rank as top areas of
interest for students.
Alloy® Research Study

16. Deep Dive – College newspapers readership
• Though internet usage among college students continues to gain strength, the
print edition still garners the most eyeballs, with just less than 20% saying they
have accessed their campus newspaper online in the past 30 days.
• Though just over one-third of students say they read their local, daily newspaper
on a weekly basis, the figure pales in comparison to the 79% of students who
reported engaging with their daily campus newspaper in the past 7 days.
• 53% of students say they read the college paper while on campus; 29% read the
paper at home.
• Strong pass-along rates: an average of 3.2 students share a single issue.
Alloy® Research Study

17. Industry Overview
Industry: College news aggregation, forum for college columnists,
journalists and students to share news and exchange opinions

18. Industry Overview – College Newspapers
• College newspapers squeezed by economic downturns
• Declining advertising revenue and increasing cost cutting
• Cost cuts may translate to lower quality and lower printing
frequency
• Although online college newspaper readership is significantly
lower, cost of publishing online is lower
• 36% of campus newspapers does not have web presence
• UWIRE, prior to shutting down had membership of 850
colleges and universities
• Opportunity to explore experiences and feedback from
members in primary research

19. Competitors – Major Media Websites

20. Competitive Landscape
Collegenews.com
• Publication of Boston Hannah International
• Goal of site is to compliment print magazine
• 38000 unique visitors in Dec 2009
• College editorial staff gathers relevant news
and information to post on site
• Website administrators install widget to
syndicate The Campus Buzz content
College Media Network
• Over 3000 student writers and editors, over
600 college newspapers
• Over 2 million online subscribers, 5 million
monthly unique visitors
• Technology based on College Publisher, used
by hundreds of US college newspapers
Content Offering • Owned by mTVU, which has established
network with universities
DailyBeast.com Google News
• Major competitor for HuffPost • 16 million unique visitors in Dec 2009
• 3 million unique visitors in Sep 2009 • One-stop shop for Google users
• Launched in 2008 • Currently has 8 categories, does not
• Does not currently aggregate from aggregate from college newspapers
college newspapers • Does not support commenting
• 37K followers on Twitter

21. Questions?

22. Appendix - Data Sources
• Company Background – Nielsen, college media matters, Alexa, Dun & Bradstreet, LinkedIn, Manta,
Yahoo!Finance, Wikipedia, Government, private studies, Newspaper association of America,
Mintel, comScore
• Demand Estimation – US census, SIC, trade associations, experts, Editor and Publisher (trade
assoc.), college publisher, StudentMonitor.com
• Monitoring the Environment – press releases, legislation, industry trends, magazine articles, gallup,
Pew Internet, Pew social trends, Technorati.com, newmediaresearch.org
• Segmentation and Targeting – PRIZM, Adage($), FT($), NAICS, InfoTech trends, Marketing Charts®
Epsilon®, Burst ®, Alloy Marketing, allbusiness.com, compete.com
• Business Intelligence Data – competitor press releases, annual reports, marketing spend (Epsilon®),
Factiva, FT($), Lexis/Nexis
• Paid Sources that would be of interest:
• PRIZM Premium (for bohemian segment “16”) – Price not available
• College Students : Connecting with the Connected Crowd - $695
• College Students Online: Driving Change in Internet and Mobile Usage - $695