She launched her namesake website 11 years ago and now plans to build Thrive Global, a health wellness site.
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“I thought HuffPost would be my last act”.
“To truly thrive means knowing when the time has come to close one chapter and start the next, and for me that time has arrived”, she said.
Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post Media Group, attends a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2014. The site recently drew almost 200 million monthly unique visitors globally.
But others had been speculating, since Yahoo was bought by Verizon last month, that Huffington might move on for fear of HuffPost being marginalized. It encompasses and offers services which include but are not limited to news, original content, satire, blogs, interviews, politics, lifestyle, business, entertainment, fashion, environment, technology, popular media, culture, comedy, healthy living, women’s interests, as well as local news.
The series A funding for Thrive Global – which will officially launch in November – was headed up by Lerer Hippeau Ventures.
Despite criticism that the site just compiled news borrowed from other sources, in 2011 it went on to become the first digital news outlet to win a Pulitzer Prize for a 10-part series about wounded USA war veterans.
It was about this time past year that Arianna Huffington, the high-profile president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, confirmed she would remain on the job until 2019.
Huffington signed a deal last June with the online publication that effectively kept her at the company until 2019. The management structure became more complicated when Verizon paid $4.4 billion to buy AOL a year ago.
AOL’s takeover of the Huffington Post had its rocky moments, in part because of tensions between AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong and Huffington over issues such as allocation of resources, Reuters has reported. “I’m filled with gratitude to all the colleagues and friends I’ve made here”, Huffington tweeted.
“Running both companies would have involved working around the clock”, she said in a press release, “which would be a betrayal of the very principles of Thrive I’ve been writing and speaking about”.
An early collaborator as well was the late Andrew Breitbart, the Westside LA conservative who worked with Matt Drudge and helped advise Huffington at first.
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AOL bought The Huffington Post in 2011 for $US315 million.
