AOL's announced purchase of the online newspaper the Huffington Post for $315 million was met with skepticism in German editorial pages Tuesday, as commentators questioned how successful the move would be for the one-time Internet giant.

The purchase of the Huffington Post was AOL's boldest gesture since its breakup with media company Time Warner in 2009. The company, which is searching for a new identity in an era when it is no longer a primary Internet service provider, has made costly missteps in recent years. Last year, AOL sold the social networking site Bebo for reportedly less than 2 percent of what it paid for it two years before. AOL also eliminated 2,500 jobs, or a third of its staff, in 2010.

With the Huffington Post, AOL is acquiring a growing presence in online journalism that expanded by 22 percent last year and boasts 25 million readers a month. Bloggers on the increasingly popular site have included US President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and movie stars George Clooney and Sean Penn.

The site was founded in 2005 by Kenny Lerer and Arianna Huffington, a Greek-born political commentator who, once an outspoken conservative in Washington, has become a leading voice on the American left in recent years. German papers ran several features Tuesday on Arianna Huffington, the former wife of oil-millionaire Michael Huffington, who will now be in charge of all content at AOL.

The Huffington Post brings a primarily liberal, well-educated, and affluent readership -- and, potentially, a new source of healthy advertising revenue -- to the formerly politically neutral AOL.

Both AOL Chairman Tim Armstrong and Huffington, who met in November and only recently started their talks of a merger, celebrated the move publicly yesterday. Armstrong told the New York Times: "I think this is going to be a situation where 1 plus 1 equals 11."

Huffington, for her part, likened the move to stepping off a fast-moving train onto a supersonic jet. "We're still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we're now going to get there much, much faster," she wrote on her site.

Writing in German newspapers Tuesday, commentators point out, though, that Armstrong has much more at stake with the merger. As one editorialist writes, if things with the merger go wrong, Huffington can always start over again with her blog -- but AOL can't.

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"Full-blown announcements of mergers should be treated with caution when they involve the American Internet service AOL. Ultimately, AOL's merger a decade ago with the media company Time Warner proved to be one of the biggest merger debacles of all time."

"With the Huffington Post, Tim Armstrong wants to push forward his strategy of enriching AOL's content, in order to bring in more advertising revenues. This strategy is not yet bearing fruit, and sales have continued to dwindle. The Huffington Post is surely a promising entity, and the glamorous founder Arianna Huffington could be an asset for AOL. But the purchase is, at best, a small step on AOL's path back from its current irrelevance."

The Financial Times Deutschland writes:

"The most surprising thing about AOL's most recent acquisition is, for many, the fact that the company still exists. The one-time Internet giant has recently only been conspicuous in its inconspicuousness. Others have provided innovation, attention to detail and growth. AOL acts, with its business model, like a dinosaur whose time has come and gone. It is doubtful that the purchase of a successful Internet site like Huffington Post can do much to change that."

"Just recently the company had to unload the social networking site Bebo, which it paid more than $800 million for, and the purchases of the Internet sites TechCrunch, Engadget and Popeater have not brought the expected results. AOL's advertising revenues have still slumped, contrary to the market trend."

"Tim Armstrong's desperation can be seen in the fact that he is handing over the responsibility for all content at AOL to Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, and is designating the production of that content as the core of the company. She, and not he, will therefore determine the future of the company. That could work, but a political blogger whose site recently had annual revenues of $30 million will find it hard to pull an entire company which has losses of about $800 million out of the abyss."

The left-leaning Berliner Zeitung writes:

"All creative types in the Internet world are afraid of developing something completely new, then getting stuck for too long in a once successful business model. That is the innovator's dilemma. And if there were one case study, it would be AOL."