Wow. There’s an announcement that takes the wind out of Super Bowl ad sails.

AOL (we’re back to all caps now, apparently) will pay $300 million in cash for the site, with the remaining $15 million paid in stock. Considering AOL’s current market cap is $2.34 billion, that represents almost 13% of the companies total value meaning that AOL is betting big on the Huffington Post. Let’s have a quick look at what everyone’s getting in this deal:

• The Huffington Post launched in 2005, primarily focused on politics. Today, they cover 22 news categories, not including local editions.
• To date, the company has raised $37 million, and started with $2 million. {CrunchBase}
• Quantcast puts the Huffington Post at 30.5 million people per month in the US, with an additional 9 million readers outside the US
• In total, that’s about $8 for each HuffPo reader
• The Huffington Post is estimated to have had $31 million in revenue last year, and is on track to do $60 million this year, nearly all of it from advertising

Under the deal, all of AOL’s content properties will now fall under a newly created Huffington Post Media Group, which Arianna Huffington will lead as president and editor in chief. That includes TechCrunch and Engadget (who’ve been butting editorial heads lately) and Stylelist among others.

More important, it really emphasizes AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s goal of making AOL a content driven media business that’s less dependent on revenue from dial-up customers. In a memo to AOL employees, Armstrong notes:

“The Huffington Post is core to our strategy and our 80:80:80 focus – 80% of domestic spending is done by women, 80% of commerce happens locally and 80% of considered purchases are driven by influencers. The influencer part of the strategy is important and will be potent.”

If that’s true, we’ll take this opportunity to double down on our previous bets for the next networks likely to be attractive acquistion targets: Mashable, Sugar, Inc. and Gawker Media. Out of those 3, Sugar, Inc. seems to be wearing the biggest bullseye. The company is almost all women’s media (check), they recently acquired local deals site FreshGuide (check) and visual shopping search engine ShopStyle not only does well on its own, but also powers product searches and editorials on sites like Style.com, that are popular with influential people.

Considering that both the TechCrunch and Huffington Post deals were rumored to have happened within a matter of months (the latter being finalized when Huffington and Armstrong were in Dallas for the Super Bowl), it may just be a matter of the right introduction.

It’s not uncommon to read about website acquisitions on TechCrunch, but on Tuesday, the popular tech blog was the subject of the story when they officially announced an acquisition by Aol. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but estimates put the purchase price somewhere between $25 million {Bloomberg} and $40 million {CNBC} for the TechCrunch network of blogs. Considering that TechCrunch never took on outside investment, founder Michael Arrington likely got the lion’s share of the money. In addition to the blogs that make up the network, there’s CrunchBase, a database of startups and investors, and events like TechCrunch Disrupt (formerly known as TechCrunch 40, then 50) and the Crunchie awards that likely made TechCrunch an attractive target.

Acquisitions of popular tech blogs aren’t anything new: Conde Nast purchased Ars Technica for $25 million in 2008; ContentNext Media, which includes digital media blog paidContent was acquired by the Guardian for $12.5 million; GigaOm is part of a tech blog network that’s raised $5.3 million from investors. TechCrunch was one of the last holdouts when it came to accepting outside investment, but now that they’re part of Aol (who are redefining themselves as a digital content company), which blogs and networks might be next on the acquisition list? Looking beyond tech, here are our best picks.

Mashable

A partnership with CNN means founder Pete Cashmore, and the stories on Mashable are already exposed to a fairly wide audience. CNN parent company Time Warner was eager to get out of its merger with AOL, so it’s unlikely that they’d be looking to add a purely digital publication to their stable. The mass market appeal could make Mashable an attractive acquisition target for Yahoo (who acquired Associated Content not long ago) or another company looking to add a popular blog brand their content portfolio. And, like TechCrunch, Mashable’s branched out from purely blog based revenue by organizing paid professional events.

Also like TechCrunch, Mashable hasn’t taken any money from investors, which means the decision to sell likely comes down to far fewer people.

Sugar Inc. Network

PopSugar, FabSugar, BellaSugar… if you’re interested in celebrities, fashion or beauty, chances are that you’ve read one of the Sugar Inc. blogs in the past month. The company’s success comes not only from the Sugar branded blogs, but acquired blogs like Coutorture and Fashionologie. Shopping search engine ShopStyle, one of the Sugar Network’s other acquisitions, is the one that would make a Sugar Inc acquisition so attractive to a large media company. Hearst acquired social shopping site Kaboodle, Time recently picked up StyleFeeder – a ShopStyle competitor, but previously used ShopStyle to power the on site shopping search for InStyle.

Sugar Inc. reportedly used some of their $31 million in funding to buy themselves out of a sales deal with NBC, so don’t look there for a possible purchaser. While ShopStyle powers the clothing search on Style.com (see our Style.com reader profile), Conde Nast still seems to be focused on establishing magazine sites like Vogue.com and GQ.com as their digital flagships, and the previous acquisitions by Time and Hearst make them unlikely suitors. Our guess for a potential acquirer? Wenner Media, the publisher behind UsWeekly, Rolling Stone and Men’s Health. The celebrity overlap with UsWeekly makes sense, and buying Sugar would be an easy way for the company to step up their digital offerings, which are currently pretty thin.

Gawker Media

Add Gawker to the list of major independent blog networks who haven’t taken outside investment. While they’re a pure media play – no events, no software based web services – Gawker does the pure media thing better than almost any other network out there. Gizmodo regularly gets tech scoops and exclusives that keep a substantial audience, and the other blog properties are no exception. Jezebel regularly exposes photoshop debacles, Gawker takes on hipster hiring policies and New York personalities, and after shuttering underperforming sites, the Gawker portfolio of sites lead in their respective categories.

While they haven’t been making many acquisitions lately – just trying to survive has been a full time job – we can see Gawker eventually ending up under the Gray Lady (the New York Times).

Those are our picks for the next big acquisition target – what are yours?

Talk about a good deal. Or a bad one, depending on which side of the coin you’d like to take.

Criterion Capital Partners are now the proud owners of one slightly used social network – Bebo. In 2008, AOL paid $850 million to acquire the network, once the number one social network for teens and young adults in the UK.

Somewhere between then and now, Bebo’s growth stalled as Facebook snapped up the #1 position in the UK and displaced the network. Bebo was in good company – in the US MySpace has shuffled the executive chairs numerous times to try to reclaim some of their former market glory. While Bebo still attracts a very healthy 12 million visitors a month, according to Google AdPlanner, there’s also a very noticeable downward trend from January of this year.

Source: Google Ad Planner

Bebo may not be entirely at fault for that. After a half-hearted attempt to integrate Bebo with AIM (AOL’s Instant Message product), the company broke with TimeWarner, got a new CEO and decided that Bebo didn’t fit with the direction they were taking going forward.

Existing Bebo users didn’t respond well to the changes, and while that may not have been the entire reason, it didn’t do anything to stave off competition from Facebook.

For what’s speculated to be tax reasons – it’s cheaper for AOL to sell the company at a fire sale price than to put in the effort required to get the network back on a path of positive growth, AOL ends with a net loss of $840 million or more for the social experiment. {TechCrunch} Neither company is confirming the final sale price, but reports range from $2.5 to less than 5 million {peHub} with the highest estimate coming in around $10 million. {TechCrunch}

And you thought Gilt’s sale prices were good.