M&A is about acquiring something you can not create... and paying a premium for that.
What AOL got is a deep understanding of the new media models that work. "What HuffPo and Arianna bring is a new cultural understanding of media that is built around the value of curation, the power of peers, the link economy, passion as an asset, and celebrity as a currency." The curation route and by the way not on the SEO-route of "making content for search" which more and more seems to me like a dead-end for media companies.
A lot of traditional media are still struggling to get beyond the "outmoded" model where "content must be something that is created only by content companies that pay content people to create it". As Jarvis puts it, "Content is no longer scarce, people. It is abundant. Google understands that. Twitter understands that. Huffington Post understands that. Sadly, old content people from old content companies still do not. Therein lies a lesson in this acquisition."