Yes, Embarrassing

Recent report from Bloomberg:

The Huffington Post, the news site that began in 2005, will post its first annual profit this year...The site has grown to more than 26 million unique monthly visitors...[It] aims to more than triple its sales to $100 million in 2012 from $30 million this year, according to a person close to the company who declined to be identified. "With such positive momentum, HuffPo can stay its course and grow organically or it can merge with or acquire someone," said Shahid Khan, chairman and chief strategist at MediaMorph Inc., a New York-based digital media-tracking service. "Its current valuation is in the $300 million to $450 million range."

Whatever one thinks of HuffPo's content or editorial slant, this is a major achievement when iconic brand names in journalism are selling for less than the price of a candy bar.

When HuffPo started there were a lot of potshots from the Right, and I seem to remember that some of them included predictions of a short lifespan. Here's one from an unsurprising source. But in purely financial terms, HuffPo has accomplished more in a few years than National Review has in over five decades (in 2005 William F. Buckley said his magazine had lost about $25 million since its inception). If National Review put itself up for sale today, what fraction of HuffPo's current valuation would it fetch?