Another look at AOL traffic: Where are the hot web properties?

Several companies evaluate traffic to websites. Alexa, a unit of Amazon.com, has daily updates. Two large audience measurement firms, comScore and NielsenNetratings, produce monthly reports. As would be expected, since the figures from all three are based on samples, the numbers often differ from one another.

ComScore's August report on Time Warner sites breaks traffic down for both the family of sites in total, but also reports traffic at individual sites.

During August, the Time Warner Network, as it is called by comScore, has total unique visitors of 121.6 million. That was up 2% from the previous year. The total Internet audience for the US rose 3% to 173.4 million.

Traffic to AOL rose 1% to 88.9 million. Mapquest traffic rose 12% to 53.2 million, which would appear to make it an unusually successful property for AOL. Traffic to AIM.com, the instant messaging home site fell 2% to 31 million. Traffic to the ICQ chat site fell 27% to 1.3 million

In August, Netscape traffic fell 22% to 10 million as the site makes the transition from being a portal to being a social news site.

At CNN.com, traffic was off 5% to 21.8 million.

What is becoming increasingly clear from this data and information from other audience sources is that Time Warner and AOL have no "hot" web properties like YouTube or MySpace. It does, almost without question, make distribution of old media content via these websites a less attractive proposition. It also draws into question whether AOL can drive audience growth by migrating away from a subscription-based model.

The data over the next few months should tell the tale.

Douglas McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.