Free Republic is the #3 Political Website

Excerpt from HuffPo's biz - NYP, June 21, 2009, by Keith J. Kelly: Even in the publicity-driven world of Web start-ups, the quest for profits and revenue ultimately trumps hype and buzz. That business truism was in play again last week when former CBS executive Betsy Morgan was bumped out of the Huffington Post, the buzzy, political Web site, and replaced as CEO by Softbank venture capitalist Eric Hippeau.
"It's essentially that the venture capitalists have taken over," said one inside source. "The financial guys have said we can get better talent than you have."
While Greek-born and aristocratic- sounding Arianna Huffington is the face of the four-year old site she founded and sits on the board of directors as editor-in-chief, she long ago ceded the CEO job to her business partners.
At the time of the departure, the company insisted that everything was going along swimmingly, that page views were up six-fold in her tenure and ad revenue had doubled.
On Thursday, on Hippeau's first full day on the job, he told The Post, "Clearly our advertising has to catch up with our traffic. There is a disparity that we have to fix."
The percentage increase masked the fact that HuffPo, as it is known, despite the enormous amount of publicity its founder generates, is still a relatively small business. Its revenue is not disclosed, but it is estimated by various sources to be in the $20 million range.
The company claims to have 22 million unique visitors a month but ComScore, which tracks the industry had them at 5.3 million unique visitors in May, up by 106 percent from a year ago.
With 61 employees, HuffPo is less the media juggernaut its buzz would suggest and more like your neighborhood retailer. In fact, East Side watering hole P.J. Clarke's has about the same size payroll.

Also, there is interesting free site Quantcast, seems it's tracking close to Hitwise for its "quantified" sites, but drops numbers dramatically for sites that are not "quantified". You might want to check it out and see if it's useful.

Some "quantified" and "not quantified" sites :
HuffPo ... Politico ... Infowars ... RealClearPolitics

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