We’re used to think that a long history and rich culture would be competitive advantages for a newspaper business. Yet this is not the case after the rise of the blogging and web 2.0 phenomena.

According to Google Trends, the traffic of Huffington Post, a four-year-old news aggregator and commentary blog with 43 employees, has already surpassed traditional media like, USA TODAY and CNBC. The site became popular after its heavy coverage of the 2008 presidential election. While major media anticipated its traffic would decrease dramatically after the election, the blog managed to sustain the growth and reached an all time high with 5.6 million visitors in April 2009.

At a time when a 158-year-old media giant running on fumes, how could the Huffington Post achieve such a spectacular growth in 4 years?

Know the Customers

Huffington Post called themselves a pure Internet newspaper and there are reasons for that. When traditional newspapers keep trying to make their websites look like a newspaper, Huffington Post makes their newspaper look like a blog. Their site has all the popular Web 2.0 features, like user-generated content, tagging, voting, live blogging, video blogging, YouTube videos, Google AdSense, RSS feeds…etc. They also let the readers easily submit and share their content to different social media sites, such as Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo Buzz. Compare to other newspapers’ websites, they have a better knowledge about what their users truly want.

Community building is a major factor for online success nowadays. Not surprisingly, their users love their site A LOT. Have you ever seen a blog post with more than 88,850 comments??? It is unreal!

Marketing Savvy

Of course, knowing your customers alone won’t give you that kind of growth in 4 years. It helps when the site’s founder, Arianna Huffington, one-time candidate for governor of California, is a celebrity herself. Ms Huffington recruited professional columnists and celebrity bloggers, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Michael Moore to write for her site. With a bit of marketing savvy and buzz marketing, Huffington Post quickly became one of the most influential and popular newspapers/bogs on the web.

It seems a lot of traditional corporate giants still don’t understand well enough about the Internet market. Some of them don’t even have a well offline-to-online transition plan in place. With correct strategies and latest technologies, small startups are still able to compete with big corporations.

Do you truly understand what your customers want? Do you have the right talents to take advantage of this web evolution? Study others’ success and your competition; your company can also be the next Huffington Post.

Related posts:

1. Built to Scale: Common Craft
2. How to Scale: Viral Loops 101
3. Scale Matters
4. Startup to IPO: Why Few Companies Make the Leap and What We Can Learn from Them (Part 4: Differentiation & Marketing)

If you enjoyed this post, get free updates by email or RSS.