Huffington Post Raises Another $5 Million, Thrives

New York new-media powerhouse Huffington Post has picked up another $5 million, says PaidContent's sharp-eyed Rafat Ali.  The existing investors all re-upped, including Bob Pittman's Pilot Group, Greycroft, Ken Lerer (Co-Founder and CEO), and Softbank Capital. 

According to an Arianna Huffington profile in USA Today, HuffPo has grown from 3 to 43 full-time employees.  The company expects to be profitable next year, driven by the election cycle.  It has no plans to begin paying its 1,800 bloggers (of which I am occasionally one), believing that promotion and association with the company is compensation enough.

HuffPo has been astoundingly successful, mostly through aggregating third-party content.  As a JupiterResearch analyst Barry Parr notes in the USA Today piece, if newspapers wish to really get cranking online, this is a model they should follow (or buy).

See Also: Huffington Post Hires "Citizen Journalism" Editor