AOL isn’t close to shuttering Patch, and don’t look for it to merge with Yahoo anytime soon. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington had to go, and the acquisition of Huffington Post by AOL will be a long-term success, said Arianna Huffington on Tuesday.
The president and editor in chief of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group dismissed questions over AOL's quarterly losses and traffic decline since the merger with HuffPo seven months ago. She said the site was working successfully to grow as a media company. And the merger hasn't hurt, she said.
“The merger has actually had the opposite effect,” she said, at TheWrap's media-leadership conference, TheGrill, at Beverly Hills’ SLS Hotel. She pointed to HuffPo's rise in traffic and expansion in editorial categories.
“Since the integration, the Huffington Post has grown 49 percent and added 24 sections … My dream was to grow in multiple ways at the same time, but we didn’t have the resources available to do that before. All of these new launches we wanted to do would have taken years,” she said.
Watch the full video of Huffington's TheGrill session below.
Get TheWrap's full coverage of the Arianna Huffington session here.
