The Huffington Post launched in 2005 using celebrity bloggers as attention bait.

Evidence

On May 10, 2005, just two days after the contagious media contest, The Huffington Post, an online aggregator of news, blogs, and other content, debuted to widespread mainstream coverage. The first issue featured blog posts by Huffington herself and, as planned, various famous people: the renowned historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; the actor John Cusack; Larry David, producer of Seinfeld; the husband-and-wife acting pair Julia Louis-Dreyfus (also of Seinfeld) and Brad Hall, jointly posting on the issue of gun violence. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 952

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Huffington Post’s celebrity-blog strategy failed and spawned BuzzFeed — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 195

Broader Connections

• Huffington Post’s celebrity-blog strategy failed and spawned BuzzFeed #expands (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 195