quebec posts

Le Huffington Post Québec launched in Montreal on February 8th with Arianna Huffington leading a whirlwind media tour, media roundtable and a luncheon. To date, Le HuffPost Québec site, led by managing editor, Patrick White, has seen 106,000 monthly unique visitors (UVs), 19,000 average daily UVs* and shows strong engagement among visitors with an average of 20.5 minutes per visitor- higher than almost all French news competitors.**

Additionally, social plays a significant role in traffic. Since Le HuffPost Québec launch in February, 32% of all entries have come from social media, and in the past seven days 43% of all entries to the site have come from social. ***

Le HuffPost Québec has already recruited 170 bloggers and has built a strong social media network on both Facebook with nearly 7,000 "Likes" and Twitter with more than 5,000 followers.

Since the launch of The Huffington Post Canada this past May, unique visitors from Quebec are up 97% to more than 340,000 UVs on Huffington Post sites*. This is the fastest and largest-per cent growth in any region of Canada.

* comScore, Inc., Total Canada, Home and Work, Quebec, February 2012
** comScore, Inc., Total Canada, Home and Work, Quebec, February 2012; based on AOL created custom list
*** AOL Internal, Feb. 8 - Mar. 21, 2012.

.@HuffPostQuebec Earns Strong Start aol.it/GHg7tK

- AOL PR (@AOLPR) March 22, 2012

On February 8, Arianna Huffington joined Graham Moysey, Brad Cressman and Dana Toering in Montreal for the launch of Le Huffington Post Québec - the second Canadian edition- and second foreign language edition of the Huffington Post. Starting at 6am, Arianna had a whirlwind (and very long!) day of media interviews- 21 to be exact- including La Presse, Infopresse, Chatelaine Magazine, popular Montreal radio station CJAD and Radio-Canada's TV show 24 heures en 60 minutes with Anne-Marie Dussault, to name a few!

In the midst of the media tour, Arianna addressed a 500-person luncheon on behalf of the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations giving a speech on "How social media are transforming the world." A crowd pleaser to say the least: Arianna captured the audience with her humour, infallible insight to Québec's culture and identity, and sophisticated expression of the Huffington Post model.

When the business was done, the team celebrated the wildly successful launch with a cocktail party. Introduced by Le HuffPost Québec managing editor Patrick White, Arianna toasted clients including launch partner Bell and its media agency, Media Experts, and the AOL Canada and Le HuffPost Québec team including bloggers!

Bonjour! As we celebrate the one-year anniversary of our acquisition of The Huffington Post, we are excited to continue our global expansion with the roll out of Le Huffington Post Quebec. Following the successful launch of Huffington Post Canada in May, the new site will be run by a strong locally-based editorial team with deep personal and professional roots in the province. Led by the site's managing editor, Patrick White, this French-language edition will encompass all things Québec and its staff will include Jean-Philippe Cipriani, as news editor and Tamy-Emma Pepin, as managing blog editor. Bloggers who will be contributing to the site include: Michel Martelly, Yves-François Blanchet, Michel Kelly Gagnon, Julius Grey, Anne Marie Withenshaw, and more. This is also the first time we'll have two HuffPost editions in the same country!

Find out more about the site from Arianna Huffington's blog post, and make sure you check out our other global sites, France's Le Huffington Post and The Huffington Post UK.

A French-language edition of The Huffington Post will launch in Quebec early next year, following the successful debut of our Canadian edition just six months ago.

Le Huffington Post Québec, based in Montreal, will begin publishing in 2012.

The announcement was made by Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief of HPMG, at the International Women in Digital Media Summit in Stratford, Ont.

The Huffington Post Canada has seen double-digit growth since it launched in May, with more than 1.8 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore. More than 200,000 unique visitors from Quebec frequent the Canadian site, up 26 per cent since it launched.

Le Huffington Post Québec is the second French-language edition to be announced, following the recent launch of Le Huffington Post France, slated to go live by year's end.

HPMG has more 20,000 bloggers. Notable Canadian contributors include David Suzuki, Romeo Saganash, Conrad Black, Kevin O'Leary, Jessica Stam, Elizabeth May, Craig and Marc Kielburger, Peter Worthington and Maude Barlow.

(This post was originally posted on The Huffington Post Canada)