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The millionaire socialite Arianna Huffington has refused to deny speculation that she will sell the Huffington Post after the American presidential election. The liberal political website, founded in 2005, overtook its right-wing counterpart the Drudge Report for the first time in February when it logged 3.7m unique visitors in a month.

An anonymous source who claims to know of discussions relating to a sale said that the figure of $200m was used when estimating the website’s value. At that price a buyer would be paying more than $50 for each user. As Wired.com commented, it’s high – but not nearly as high as the $1,186 valuation of each user represented by Microsoft’s $44.6bn bid for Yahoo.

Huffington, who was Arianna Stassinopoulos before marrying Republican politician Michael Huffington in 1986, was educated at Cambridge. She was a noted conservative commentator until she divorced her husband, after which she experienced a political volte face and devoted her life to liberal politics.

She started the Huffington Post to give big-name left-wing personalities like Walter Cronkite, Diane Keaton, John Zogby and Alec Baldwin a chance to answer back the popular conservative pundits that proliferated during the Bush presidency. Critics of her site, however, say it is little more than a “liberal dinner party”.

Πηγή: The First Post