What Site Will Be Sold Next?

In agreeing to buy The Huffington Post for $315 million, AOL is putting what appears to be a significant premium on the ability to attract and build a community of readers. Yet as more and more advertising dollars flow to the Web and to mobile devices, demand is rising for popular and prolific online content producers like The Huffington Post.

The market for online advertising is expected to increase 14 percent, to $51.9 billion, this year, according to the research firm Borrell Associates. With that kind of growth, the deal for The Huffington Post is expected to raise the bar for other independent online media companies whose audiences have surged with the help of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Speculation is now turning to what prices others could fetch should they ever go on the block. Among the biggest is Gawker Media, home to a collection of popular sites, including its flagship property and technology blog, Gizmodo, which attracts about 19 million users a month, according to comScore. Glam Media, a group of beauty and fashion sites geared toward women, boasts 87.8 million visitors a month. The three-year-old Business Insider, something akin to a business version of The Huffington Post, with its mix of breaking original content and aggregation, attracts 3.5 million visitors a month, comScore says.