She, however, stated that the contract broadened her horizons and helped her to launch her new company “Thrive Global” even as she continued in her role at the site.
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“I thought HuffPost would be my last act”, she tweeted to her 2.3 million followers.
“I really thought I could do both, but as we started building it up, I realized that it really needed my full attention”, she told the Wall Street Journal.
Greek-born Huffington admitted she had considered running both companies at the same time but said doing so would have involved working around the clock and would have been a “betrayal” of her principles.
The Huffington Post now operates in 10 languages, producing some 1,500 pieces of content and reaching 178 million people daily.
When she finally obtained Series A funding for her new business late last week, she stated that it had become obvious that she couldn’t continue to oversee the Huffington Post.
Arianna Huffington resignation did not conclude as who would succeed as editor-in-chief.
Arianna Huffington is leaving her eponymous online news brainchild to focus on a new venture. The site had 75 million unique visitors on desktop and mobile in the U.S.in June, down 18 percent from a year ago, Comscore data show.
The Huffington Post was among the first major news organizations to benefit from consumer interest in online information. “Today, it’s clear that was an illusion”.
The Huffington Post was launched in 2005 as a liberal-leaning news aggregation site.
More recently, though, Huffington changed her tune.
Huffington says Thrive Global is a platform to “promote well-being and productivity”, “address the pandemic of stress”, “maximize creativity” and “transform our culture from surviving to thriving”.
Thrive has received funding from Lerer Hippeau Ventures – led by a HuffPost co-founder Kenneth Lerer – and other groups and individuals including National Basketball Association star Andre Iguodala and entrepreneur and philanthropist Sean Parker. She has published several books on health and wellness, including “Thrive” and “The Sleep Revolution”, and she has become a champion of a good night’s sleep. But Huffington Post also has acquired a large staff of journalists doing original reporting and in 2012 won a Pulitzer Prize for a series on wounded veterans and their families.
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Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL, called Huffington “a visionary”, noting the company “is grateful for what she has done in creating such an iconic brand”.
