The Huffington Post Starts To Give Out Badges To Readers

Erick Schonfeld:

The Huffington Post is taking on more of the trappings of a social network. Borrowing from Foursquare, today it will start giving out badges to loyal readers who share a lot of HuffPost stories via Facebook and Twitter (the Networker), comment like crazy (the Superuser), or flag inappropriate comments (the Moderator). The site also redesigned its user profile page to better highlight each user's comment stream, and her friends, fans, or followers.

Last summer, the site launched its HuffPost Social News network, allowing readers to log in with their Facebook IDs, and friend, fan, and follow each other on the site. It later added Twitter, Google, and Yahoo as login options. "We want to incorporate the best of social media," Arianna Huffington tells me. "It is important for the growth of the site so far, and even more important for the future growth."

The Huffington Post is already fairly huge. Five years after she launched it as a politics blog, it now attracts 23 million readers a month in the U.S. (comScore, March, 2010), which is more than the NYTimes.com (13.3 million). And the site now covers 20 different news categories, including media, entertainment, sports, business, and local city sections for New York, L.A., Chicago, and Denver. An art section is launching next month, and after that a travel section. Politics now represents less than a quarter of the HuffPosts's traffic.