Key Time Warner websites start to take off

With its new strategy of selling advertising to produce revenue, Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) needed to see some audience increases as AOL users moved to a "free" platform. It appears that the process has begun and most initial results are good.

For the month of November, ComScore figures showed that all TWX sites throughout the Time Warner Network had an increase of unique visitors from 114.2 million unique visitors to 119.7 million. More importantly, the audience for AOL rose 7% to 90.5 million.

This is well above the increase in the audience of all Internet visitors, which was up only 2% year-over-year. Another of AOL's largest properties, MapQuest, had an audience increase of 12% to 45.2 million. AOL Money & Finance moved into first place in the finance category, jumping over Yahoo! Finance this November compared to last. It also moved ahead of MSN Money as the AOL finance property had an audience increase of 10%.

There were some laggards in the Time Warner stable. Netscape, the formal portal and the company's blog site, had an audience drop of 33% compared to November last year, down to 8 million unique visitors. Audience for ICQ, the online community site, dropped 26% to a little over 1 million unique visitors.

The AOL audience-building strategy may well work if the audience numbers keep rising the way they did in November.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St. BloggingStocks is produced by AOL Money & Finance in collaboration with AOL subsidiary, Weblogs, Inc.