Huffington Post adds Australian edition, plans for entry into China

Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington, pictured.

By Jason Abbruzzese2015-02-08 19:00:01 UTC

The Huffington Post is headed to Australia, with more international expansion on the horizon including Mexico and China.

The digital media publication will be launching in Australia in the second quarter of 2014 in partnership with Fairfax Media, a local Australian firm. Australia represents one of the last western markets that HuffPo had not yet tapped. After this, its focus turns to the more challenging and arguably more lucrative non-Western markets.

"Australia was always on our roadmap for the future. It's incredibly important for us to be there, and it was just a question of settling on the right partner," said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post

While the Australian launch is no small venture the country's digital advertising market hit $4.5 billion in 2014 expansion into China puts the company on track to tap a giant market that few Western media companies have been able to enter.

Huffington said the company would be focusing on lifestyle content in China, choosing to avoid covering more controversial topics, particularly politics.

"When it comes to lifestyle, which is what we would like to do in China, all the areas where The Huffington Post has thought leadership and very deep content... that's an area where we're getting tremendous interest in China and where we would have a lot of value added," Huffington said.

As long as the company is able to get the necessary approvals from the government, HuffPo's China edition could be up and running by the end of 2015, said Jimmy Maymann, CEO of The Huffington Post.

Entering China, he added, means also having to adapt to a new media strategy, particularly the importance of messaging apps.

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Huffington Post adds Australian edition, plans for entry into China