Garmin Ltd. (NASDAQ: GRMN) has entered a partnership with MapQuest, Inc., a unit of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) via its AOL unit.

The companies announced plans for the upcoming launch of a new feature that will allow Garmin users to send trip planning results straight from from MapQuest to their Garmin personal navigation device. This will allow users to find a place or to plan and research routes that can then be sent directly to Garmin GPS units with a "Send to GPS" drop down option.

This will also allow users to access previously sent location data from their Garmin devices without needing to input information directly on the device. This new "Send-to-Garmin" feature will be available in April and expands on some existing MapQuest "Send-To" features that already allow consumers to send directions from the MapQuest site to their cell phones.

The gamble that Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) made with AOL was fairly simple, but risky. Exit the internet service provider business and give up most of that revenue. Offer services like e-mail and access to AOL content for free. Hope that the number of visitors and pageviews grows and that the advertising from these will grow beyond the subscription revenue.

Early numbers from comScore are promising. AOL's unique visitors grew 9% in February to 88.9 million. Visitors to MapQuest grew 12% to 45.1 million. AIM.com visitors were up 7%. Of the major AOL properties, only Netscape was down, by 14%. Netscape moved from being a portal to a user-created content site late last year.

Management at Time Warner has to breathe a sigh of relief. Without a growing audience base, moving advertising revenue up would be nearly impossible. If the future months keep up the trend, the change in model may well pay off.

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

ComScore is out with its September numbers for Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) and AOL's largest sites. These numbers, along with data from Nielsen/NetRatings and Alexa are used to follow the audience activity at major web properties.

September was not a particularly good month for Time Warner's web properties. The total US audience of unique web users rose 2% from the same month a year ago to 173.4 million. Only one major Time Warner site grew faster than that. Unique visitors to MapQuest were up 10% to 48.6 million.

Unique visitors to the Time Warner network of sites rose 1% to 120.3 million. AOL was down 1% to 88 million. Visitors to the AIM.com and AIM Application site fell 1% to 29.6 million unique visitors.

CNN.com's unique visitors fell 7% to 24.4 million compared to September 2005.

Netscape, in the midst of its transition to a blog site, fell 23% to 9.9 million. Unique visits to the ICQ community site fell 48% to 911,000.

The ComScore data supports the figures from the other two measurement services. If AOL is planning to replace subscription revenue with online advertising dollars, the audience of its web properties is going to have to start growing.

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

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.

Nielsen/NetRatings should be out with September numbers for unique visitors to major websites by Tuesday of next week. But, ahead of those numbers, it is informative to look at the Alexa ratings from the website-tracking division of Amazon.com, Inc. They may be a fairly good preview of next week's ratings news.

According to Alexa, AOL.com's ranking among all websites this week is 41st. Its three month average ranking is 36th, which with these kind of audience measurements is not a meaningful difference. The same holds true for CNN.com. Its rank for the current week is 36th and its average rank for the last three months is 31st.

There is more movement among smaller websites where traffic is likely to fluctuate more than it does in the Top 50.

Mapquest, a surprisingly large property, ranks 123rd this week and has a three month average rank of 112th. AIM.com, the home site of AOL Instant Messenger, ranked 355th this week and 335th for its three month average.

ICQ.com, another AOL site for chat and message traffic, rose from 300th place as its three month average to 324th for the week.

The largest drop was for Netscape.com which was changed from an Internet portal to a social news site in July. Its three-month rank is 383rd. Its average rank for the current week is 554th. By contrast, its closest competition, Digg.com, ranked 91st for the last three months and 85th this week.

For reference, the top six websites worldwide as measured by Alexa, are Yahoo!, MSN, Google, Chinese web properties Baidu.com and qq.com, and MySpace. Unlike Nielsen or comScore, Alexa measures individual sites. The other services measure site families, so, in the case of AOL, most of the sites mentioned here would be reported as a group and the overall ranking would be much higher. (comScore has told us that they break out both site families and individual sites.)

Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) and AOL management probably hope that the Nielsen/NetRatings numbers paint a somewhat better picture.

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

What does Google's most recent upgrades to its Google Maps and Google Earth services mean? These services are among the most successful Google products outside of its bread-n-butter internet search business, according to the source story. Posit: What measure of success is in use here? Successful products used by customers are fantastic -- making money with those products is another side of the coin (literally).

Yes, Google Maps is extremely useful and impressive. In fact, I've used it more than Yahoo! Maps recently -- although Mapquest.com continues to be my default mapping and address search service. Google Earth is nothing short of stunning, and it's been on the market -- with a recent upgrade a few weeks ago -- for over a year now. Count Google in as knowing how to launch and upgrade excellently-performing services.

But I have to hold my applause for one thing: How are these being successful at bringing in revenue? Sure, they are great stories insofar as customer usage and acceptance. This is a very good thing. But from an investor's perspective, how are these contributing to Google's bottom line? Are ads working in Google Maps as well as in search? How does Google Earth benefit Google? Is Google planning to insert some kind of advertising into Google Earth to "monetize" the product? Or, is Google simply building a customer intelligence database from Google Earth to be used in more highly-targeted marketing in the future? These are questions GOOG investors should be asking -- ones I would be asking if I held shares.