Huffington Post Just Keeps Growing

Well, the bad news keeps coming, but at least one section of the media is faring well: political Web sites.

After hearing about the excellent success of FiveThirtyEight.com this morning, we wondered how traffic to the liberal stronghold the Huffington Post did in October.

Drum roll, please.

While the ComScore numbers, which showed the site had 4.5 million uniques in September, won’t be out for another 10 days or so, Mario Ruiz — the VP of communications — told us that internal calculations showed HuffPo had 22.3 million uniques during October, up from 19.5 million in September. While this number is obviously much higher than the ComScore number, it still represents an increase of 14 percent over September. If the ComScore number jumped up a similar percentage, the site would have gotten around 5.1 million uniques in October.

The question now becomes what will happen in November when the election fervor calms down. Can the site’s focus on other verticals sustain traffic? Our guess is no, but we’d love to be wrong.

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