One of the more curious rumours to surface recently has been the suggestion that Yahoo is interested in buying the Huffington Post.
TechCrunch says the pair are already in discussions about a "deep content partnership" and speculates that would involve sharing videos, news articles and opinion pieces and possibly even advertising to be published across the Yahoo News network.
Photo by Michael Verdi on Flickr. Some rights reserved
The New York Post backed this up claiming that Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz has drawn up a hitlist of content sites he's like to buy or partner with to try and stem Yahoo's 25% drop in visitors in a year. That list included: Twitter, Foursquare, Demand Media Associated Content and HuffPo.
Yahoo has always been more focused on content than you-know-who - a strategy that hasn't exactly proved a moneyspinner. But Yahoo News is quietly pervasive and, if Yahoo wasn't bothered by the liberal-leaning nature of the site, would be a high profile trophy for the firm. There's a natural fit there too for Yahoo's vast display ad network; HuffPo was looking at sponsored tweets and comments late last year but had little take up. Yahoo is a gateway to advertising that's an order of magnitude away.
TechCrunch reminds us HuffPo has even passed the New York Times site in traffic with 26m global unique users in April, has become the biggest blog in the world and is even dabbling in gaming systems including badges and rewards to increase reader loyalty.
But the high-profile would probably come at a price too high for Yahoo - perhaps $360m.
For the Huffington Post, acquisition would mean slipstreaming Yahoo's huge audience to grow its own readership and associated advertising.
But does Arianna Huffington want to sell her baby? It's not like she needs the money, and the site is still in ascendancy so why bail out now? And if a content partnership could deliver the same kind of expansion, there's no real incentive for selling.
