Aol (AOL) competes with Yahoo! (YHOO), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Facebook in the display advertising business (as well as being the parent of Bloggingstocks). The average monthly unique visitors on Aol sites declined from around 123 million in 2008 to 111 million in 2010, as the company cut back or shut down a few of its European operations. The sale of business divisions like Bebo and ICQ in 2010 also contributed to the decline in unique visitors.

Though Aol sold a few of its business divisions, it also made several acquisitions, like Patch.com, StudioNow, TechCrunch, 5Min Media, Thing Labs and Pictela last year. These acquisitions suggest Aol's increasing focus on content production (articles and videos) and syndication, in order to attract more visitors to its sites and generate more advertising revenues. Aol's recent acquisition of Huffington Post is another step in this direction.

Online media giant AOL (AOL) has bought The Huffington Post for $315 million. It will pay $300 million in cash, the rest in stock for the news website.

When The Huffington Post raised money just over a year ago, the value of the site was rumored to be $125 million. It has 25 million unique users a month, according to Comscore figures. AOL has just over 90 million. The combined user bases could push the total ahead of MSN, the Microsoft (MSFT) portal, and perhaps Yahoo! (YHOO).

AOL, the parent company of BloggingStocks, said in a release that Arianna Huffington would lead the newly formed Huffington Post Media Group, which will integrate all the content from The Huffington Post and AOL sites, from politics and finance to Moviefone and Mapquest.

U.S. stock futures are higher Monday morning. Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 28 points to 12,073.00, while those for the S&P 500 index gained 4.2 points to 1,311.40. Futures for the Nasdaq Composite rose 6.25 points to 2,343.75.

U.S. markets closed higher on Friday, with the Dow Industrials gaining 29.89 points, or 0.25%, to close at 12,092.15.

Data on consumer credit for December will be released at 3:00 p.m. ET.

James Altucher is a financial journalist for The Wall Street Journal and founder of Stockpickr.com. His articles cover every angle of the market; he also stars in feature videos with other financial luminaries. He is the author of Trade Like a Hedge Fund, Trade Like Warren Buffett, SuperCa$h, and The Forever Portfolio.

He has taken a controversial path lately with numerous articles in the New York Post and Huffington Post. Some articles include: "Global Warming Is a Myth," "Should Insider Trading Be Made Legal?" "School of Hard Cash," "The Internet Is Dead (as an Investment)," and "5 Myths the Recession Taught Us."

Rumors of a new addition to the James Altucher library have entered the blogosphere, so I met with James to discuss a possible new book and the response from his recent aggressive views on finance and the stock market.

A wonderful 19th century writer offered observations in print from time to time. He remains one of our nation's best role models and minds, so accordingly the following economic insights and observations are offered, With Malice Toward None.

----

First, why does it look like in this market all of good long plays have been bid-up to $47, and all short plays are trading near $8?

The layoffs are already well under way at big media companies including Viacom (NYSE:VIA) and NBCU. But, what about the new media world, all of the blogs which have been created over the last three or four years? Those not owned by large companies (Blogging Stocks is owned by AOL), may simply not make it, even though they have become remarkably popular.

One of the largest blog networks, Gawker, has already said it will need to cut a significant numbers of people. And, it is a profitable company. A lot of independent blogs built up staff and other costs in the anticipation that growing visitors and pageviews would allow them to benefit from increasing advertising revenue. The recession has robbed them of that hope. The blogs backed by venture capitalists may not be able to get more money. Those which never raised money and have never had access to outside capital could be in the most trouble.

Some blogs have been lucky. paidContent was sold to the Guardian group in the UK. Ar's Technical, a tech blog, was sold to Conde Nast. Huffington Post raised $25 million. According to blog measurement site Technorati, Huffington is the top blog in the US. That gives it the advantage of size and branding.

There are several hundred blogs which have become important voices within their fields. Many of those that ramped up expenses in 2006 and 2007 are not going to make it. The revenue they were hoping for is not going to show up.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wall st.com.

The business model of The Huffington Post, the largest and most famous political blogging and opinion site, fell apart completely yesterday. According to Hitwise, Huffington's traffic grew by 21% from October 28 to November 4. It has been rising sharply over the last year as interest in the election picked up speed.

With the election over, Huffington's traffic is certain to drop sharply and all of the reporters and editors it has hired since the beginning of the year may not have much to do.

Traditional wisdom is that old media will have to cut costs to stay alive, but there are some very successful Internet properties that may have to cut more since their natural audiences are leaving them. Political sites may turn to business and lifestyle reporting, but those categories are already crowded.

The Wall Street Journal writes "History, however, indicates that news outlets that benefit significantly from an election suffer about the same amount when it's over, so the Web sites will expand now at their peril."

Looking at Huffington, audience measurement service Compete shows the political website's traffic up 711% for the year ending in September. That number probably got even more impressive last month. In September, Huffington had 5.3 million visitors. In 2008, that figure was never above one million.

With all of the audience that Huffington is almost certain to lose it will also part with most of its advertising. And, with that, the large staff it will not be able to afford.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

The head of CBS (NYSE: CBS) operation CBSNews.com is leaving to become CEO of popular blog Huffington Post. Blogging must have hit the big time.

Huffington is bringing Betsy Morgan on board to run one of the most visited blogs on the internet. Calling itself an online newspaper, the collection of breaking stories and opinion has raised money from Softbank and Greycroft Partners. The company may have brought in as much as $10 million from VCs.

Huffington claims to have 3.5 million unique visitors a month, according to The New York Times. The company has more than 40 employees.

While the news is not earth-shattering by itself, it does highlight a trend as management and editorial talent moves from mainstream media to companies like Huffington, TechCrunch, and GigaOm. Most of these blogs were started by one or two people, but are now companies that reportedly bring in seven figures in revenue each year.

The rise of the blog may also be something of an unpleasant reminder to the newspaper industry that it has not done well with its online businesses and that much smaller news and comment sites have risen from nowhere to take over much of the market. Once again entrepreneurs triumph over big business.

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