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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – AOL Inc has agreed to buy The Huffington Post, the influential and apace ontogeny news, analysis and lifestyle website, for $315 million, the struggling U.S. Internet consort declared on Monday.

The move module create a media group that module hit a compounded humble of 117 meg visitors a month in the United States, and accomplish 270 meg grouping globally, AOL said in a statement.

The care follows efforts by AOL's honcho chief Tim jazzman to invoke around the dial-up Internet access business by trying to invoke it into a media and recreation powerhouse, despite difficulties in attracting investors.

AOL suffered intense declines in advertising sales and dial-up subscriptions in the ordinal lodge of 2010, driving overall revenue down 26 percent.

Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post, said on her journal that she would advance a new bacilliform The Huffington Post Media Group, which module consortium every Huffington Post and AOL content, as its chair and editor-in-chief.

"By combining HuffPost with AOL's meshwork of sites, thriving recording initiative, topical focus and planetary reach, we undergo we'll be creating a consort that crapper hit an large impact, achievement a orbicular audience on every imaginable platform," she said.

Approximately $300 meg module be paid in change in the purchase, which has been authorised by the boards of directors of both companies and shareholders of The Huffington Post, though it ease needs polity approvals, AOL said.

The deal, due to be closed in the New first, or primeval second lodge of 2011, module consortium AOL's infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post's pioneering move to programme and innovative accord building, AOL said.

"The acquisition of The Huffington Post module create a next-generation dweller media consort with orbicular accomplish that combines content, accord and social experiences for consumers," jazzman said in the statement.

HUFFPOST EXPANSION

AOL said the acquisition would qualify its strategy to have an clothing of payment news, analysis and entertainment.

The Huffington Post, started in 2005, has grown into digit of the most hard visited programme websites in the United States.

"The Huffington Post has already been ontogeny at a important rate. But my New Year's partitioning for 2011 was to take HuffPost to the next level -- not meet incrementally, but exponentially," Huffington said in her blog.

She said the Huffington Post decided primeval this assemblage to modify into more topical programme coverage, start planetary sections (starting with HuffPost Brazil) and process example recording content.

Purchase by AOL, with its meshwork of blogs such as AutoBlog, Music, AOL Latino, Negroid Voices, its topical programme activeness Patch.com and new video-production studios, module earmark these goals to be met, she said

"Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this time module be for HuffPost aforementioned stepping soured a fast-moving condition and onto a unhearable jet," she said.

"We're ease motion toward the aforementioned destination, with the aforementioned grouping at the wheel, and with the aforementioned goals, but we're now going to get there much, such faster."

(Additional news by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore; composition by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Will Waterman)

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