[SUPER RICH] News aggregators who rose to prominence

News aggregation sites are on the rise.

These websites don’t produce much original content, instead bringing in famous columnists or aggregate preexisting news and add videos or photos to the story.

News aggregating websites have grown in the past few years, and have been sold for enormous sums or attracted large-scale investments.

Arianna Huffington – The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post is one of the first media companies to introduce the concept of news aggregation to the general public. The name comes from the founder and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington.

Huffington, born in Athens, Greece, in 1950 as Arianna Stassinopoulos, worked as a writer and columnist in the United States and began a blog in the early 2000s named “Ariannaonline.com,” a precursor to the Huffington Post, which was founded in 2005.

In addition to aggregating news and having celebrity columnists, the website also featured online comments, an uncommon feature back then.

Jonah Peretti, who would later become the founder of Buzzfeed, was a cofounder and helped bring in traffic through search engine optimization.

The Huffington Post was sold to AOL in 2011 for $315 million, and news reports said Ariana Huffington got at least $21 million from the deal. In 2012, Ariana Huffington’s total assets were estimated to be around $500 million and she was listed as one of Forbes’ “Most Powerful Women.”

The website is still going strong with curated news content and celebrity columnists. According to digital market analytics company comScore, over 117 million American users visit The Huffington Post per month.

Jonah Peretti - Buzzfeed

Buzzfeed is another popular news aggregation website that sees around 200 million visitors every month.

Jonah Peretti founded Buzzfeed in 2006 and started working on the website full time after leaving The Huffington Post. Peretti’s total assets are estimated to be around $100 million.

Buzzfeed provides popular or humorous content and photos in the form of lists, commonly referred to as “listicles.” One of the latest Buzzfeed posts to go viral was the photo of “The Dress,” featuring a seemingly ambiguous-colored dress. The post brought 40 million views to the website.

Forbes described Peretti and his website as a media “disruptor” in 2013. According to website value calculator Worth of Web, Buzzfeed -- which is currently preparing an IPO -- is worth about $3.2 billion.

In addition to “listicles,” Buzzfeed is foraying into more serious journalism, having launched an investigative journalism team last year. The number of investigative reporters also grew to 11 this year, with plans to expand.

Mike McCue - Flipboard

Flipboard, a magazine-format mobile app, aggregates content from social media and various other websites and presents it in a magazine format for its users. Flipboard is localized in over 20 languages.

Flipboard founder Mike McCue spent difficult teenage years in poverty, losing his father to cancer and not being able to go to college, instead having to support the family.

McCue bounced around across different software companies and start-ups, eventually founding Flipboard in 2010, which saw its 100 millionth user last November.

Flipboard has raised a total of $160 million in investment from 17 investors -- including Goldman Sachs -- and has partnered with 72 websites, including the Washington Post.

There are also rumors that big Internet companies are seeking to acquire Flipboard. Technology news site Re/Code reported in May that according to insider sources, Twitter has been talking with Flipboard and has offered $1 billion to acquire it.

Zhang Yiming – Toutiao

Asia also has a member of the superrich who rose to prominence via news aggregation.

China’s Toutiao is a personalized news app that aggregates news from all over the Web. Toutiao saw 240 million registered users in 31 months, with around 20 million viewers daily. It has also partnered with 36 Chinese media companies.

Zhang Yiming, founder and CEO of Toutiao, majored in computer science at Nankai University in Tianjin, and after a series of failures, finally founded Toutiao in August 2012.

Forbes China listed Zhang as one of the top Chinese entrepreneurs under 30, and his assets are estimated to be around $500 million.

By The Korea Herald Superrich Team (sangyj@heraldcorp.com)

Kwon Nam-keun, Hong Seung-wan, Sung Yeon-jin, Bae Ji-sook, Yoon Hyun-jong, Min Sang-seek, Kim Hyun-il, Sang Youn-joo