Short answers, pulled from the story.
HuffPost was founded on the 9th of May 2005, by Arianna Huffington, Andrew Breitbart, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti. It launched as a progressive alternative to conservative news aggregators such as the Drudge Report.
AOL acquired The Huffington Post in March 2011 for $315 million. As part of the deal, Arianna Huffington became president and editor-in-chief of HuffPost and several AOL-owned properties.
HuffPost won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 in the category of national reporting for senior military correspondent David Wood's Beyond the Battlefield, a 10-part series about wounded veterans. It was the first commercially run United States digital media enterprise to win the award.
HuffPost is a division of BuzzFeed, which acquired it from Verizon Media in November 2020. BuzzFeed paid in stock rather than cash for the acquisition.
By July 2025, HuffPost's traffic had dropped 40% due to Google's "AI Overviews" feature, which displays AI-generated blurbs in search results and diverts readers away from publisher pages.
HuffPost did not pay the vast majority of its bloggers. From its launch in 2005 until 2018, the site published content from as many as 100,000 unpaid contributors. A class-action lawsuit seeking compensation was dismissed on the 30th of March 2012, with the court ruling that publication itself constituted the bloggers' compensation.