HuffPo ascends toward top news sites as it turns 5

NEW YORK — The Huffington Post will soon turn five-years-old — veritable old-age in Internet years.

As the site, co-founded by Arianna Huffington and launched on May 9, 2005, marks the anniversary, its proclaimed mission to be an "Internet newspaper" gains more credence every time its traffic surpasses the websites of its print brethren.

It recently made the top 10 current events and global news sites, with 13 million unique users in March, an increase of more than 94 percent over the year before, according to Nielsen Online. If the trend continues, The Huffington Post could soon pass The New York Times' website (16.6 million uniques in March) in traffic this year.

The growth is a remarkable feat for a site launched as little more than a collection of celebrity bloggers, a liberal rival to the Drudge Report.

Since then, HuffPo, as it is known, has developed 20 sections ranging from food to books, launched four city-specific pages and integrated itself with social networks, partnering with Facebook and Twitter.

Ken Lerer, chairman and co-founder, says he recently looked up the Huffington Post from 2005 on Archive.org.

"I was floored," he says. "It seemed really boring, very clean. It was great, but there wasn't a lot there compared to where we are now."

Now, the breadth of the Huffington Post — combining work from a paid staff of 70 reporters and editors, some 6,000 bloggers writing for free, and content from The Associated Press (they're a paying member) and other media companies — is considerably greater.

It's a low cost, high content formula that has proven exceptionally efficient at attracting readers, though it hasn't yet achieved profitability through advertising, which Lerer says is robust this year. (Greg Coleman, formerly an ad executive at AOL and Yahoo, was recently hired as chief revenue officer to increase advertising revenue.)

"I'm completely sure the site will be profitable by the end of the year," Huffington says. "It would have been profitable a lot sooner if we hadn't kept growing."

Maturing from primarily a political news site to a general interest destination is an interesting proposition in an online world where success has often meant focusing on niche markets. In some ways, HuffPo is beginning to resemble an old-fashioned newspaper.

"Huffington Post is still saying, 'What people still like is everything — or a lot — in one place,'" says Ken Doctor, author of "Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get."