Publication undergoes a rebranding and redesign following co-founder Arianna Huffington’s exit last year
By Mike Shields, Wall Street Journal:
The Huffington Post is officially nudging Arianna Huffington out of its name.
The namesake site co-founded by Ms. Huffington in 2005 is now simply: HuffPost.
Ms. Huffington departed as editor in chief in August to focus on her new wellness startup, about a year after Verizon Communications closed its acquisition of AOL, which owned the Huffington Post.
The new streamlined brand comes at a critical time for HuffPost, which recently installed Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times as its new editor in chief and Jared Grusd as chief executive. As part of the rebranding effort, HuffPost has also undergone a major site redesign, unveiled Tuesday.
The brand tweak is likely to garner the most attention in media circles. The site is trying to pull off a neat trick: honoring the influence of a founder who at one point singularly reflected the site’s sensibility, while also proving that HuffPost is bigger than any one person.
“Arianna’s drive and wit still flow through HuffPost,” said Mr. Grusd. “The new name is a real homage to her legacy, but it also sort of moves us forward. The site is almost 12 years old, and is bigger than just one person. Our identity now means a lot of things to a lot of people. So this is sort of us saying, ‘Here’s what we are doing in the new world order.’”
Part of that new world order includes a new logo and slicker design—one with hopefully more impactful ads. That means more prominent video ads on HuffPost’s front page and throughout the site, and more “native” content produced for advertisers, said Mark Silverstein, HuffPost’s head of business development and monetization.
The full redesign afforded HuffPost an opportunity to pare down the list of ad tech partners employed by the site, which should speed up performance, said Mr. Silverstein.
Plus, HuffPost took this opportunity to ditch a number of ad units that “nobody wanted anymore,” he said. Over the years, HuffPost, like many publishers, kept adding new ad types without getting rid of older ones. “We’d have 16 iterations of essentially the same thing except one version would have 10 extra pixels or one pixel more,” Mr. Silverstein said.
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