AOL Canada and the Huffington Post Media Group are expanding the Huffington Post Canada brand into Western Canada with the addition of HuffPost British Columbia and HuffPost Alberta. The sites will debut this fall.
HuffPost Canada became the first international edition of the U.S. news site, content aggregator and blog when it launched in May 2011. It started a Quebec operation, Le Huffington Post Québec, in February.
Graham Moysey, general manager for HuffPost Canada parent AOL Canada, said in a release that Western Canada currently accounts for more than one third of all Canadian traffic to Huffington Post sites, making expansion into that market a “natural progression.”
HuffPost Canada has seen “tremendous success” in its one year of operation, he said, with monthly unique visits growing by 80% to 2.8 million.
In a release, AOL said the sites would feature HuffPost’s signature mix of news, blogging, community and social engagement.
“The strong social DNA, vital to the HuffPost model, will extend to connect with the social communities of B.C. and Alberta,” said Moysey in a release. “The Huffington Post Canada currently generates more than two million social actions a month through its commenting and sharing platforms and its social media channels including Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.”
Today’s announcement comes amid reports of a diminished role for Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington within AOL. When AOL purchased the Huffington Post for US$315 million last year, Huffington was handed editorial control for all of its properties, which include the tech-news site TechCrunch, Patch.com, MovieFone and MapQuest.
Huffington acknowledged in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week that her role with AOL has been scaled back to include only the Huffington Post. However, she downplayed reports that her relationship with AOL chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong is strained, telling the Journal “all is good” and that the decision to step back from overseeing all of AOL’s editorial properties was hers.
