HuffPost and the Times of India Group have ended their partnership, multiple, reliable sources, including current and former employees, have confirmed to MediaNama. The deal was Times Bridge's flagship partnership: Times Bridge is the Times of India Group’s international investments and partnerships division, and its investments and/or partnerships include Airbnb, Coursera, Uber, Vice, Business Insider, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, PC Mag, Advertising Age, Goal, Tech Radar and Techpost. HuffPost (previously Huffington Post) partnership had launched the Indian website in December 2014. This would be the second AOL deal to collapse in India. In 2013, Techcrunch's India partnership with NetworkPlay fell apart after their India event. Sources said that HuffPost decided not to renew the 3-year partnership for business reasons, and also cited editorial strategy interference from Times Bridge's head of content strategy Thane Richard. The deal with the Times of India group The sources described the Huffpost-Times Bridge deal as follows: The Times Group would pay the salaries of Huffington Post India employees and in return, Huffington Post globally would share some of the revenue. "Essentially, our cheques came from Times Internet always," said a source who was laid off in June. Others concurred, and added that this is the same with other news publications which are under Times Bridge in India. This year, sources said that Times Internet had asked the website to trim its budget. While one source said that Times Internet had halved the budget for HuffPost, another senior employee said that budget for editorial was to be reduced from Rs 5 crore to Rs 4 crore this year. The Times of India…
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