LONDON — Nearly two years after launching, HuffPost Live, Huffington Post’s effort to reinvent rolling TV news, is on the verge of breaking even, says HuffPost’s CEO.
“We’ve gotten to more than 100 million video views on a monthly basis now,” Jimmy Maymann tells Beet.TV. “We need scale to appeal to TV buyers – we’re getting there but we’re not there yet. We’re getting to a point, 18 months in, where we can see break-even. It’s been a big investment.”
Next stop for the service, which sees viewers and guests contribute in a 12-hours-a-day live video operation, is internationalization.
“As we go through this year and put it on more platforms – put it on radio, we might put it on cable – then, next year, we ‘re looking at what will HuffPost Live will look like from an international perspective,” Maymann says, adding that modern consumers want to be part of the programming they consume.
A deal to place HuffPost Live on Mark Cuban’s AXS TV has not yet come to fruition, though HuffPost has been publishing opinion-led audio content under the moniker “HuffPost Radio” for several months.
We spoke with him at the FT Digital Media Conference. To view all our coverage of the conference, visit this page.