Why AOL was so eager to hook up with HuffPo

The dismal numbers on traffic to AOL’s major media brands come from comScore, noted in a report at Advertising Age magazine. For some AOL sites, the number of unique visitors in February (a much more precise measurement than page views) was down by more than 40 percent compared with the same month a year ago. AOL Games, for example, saw the number of visitors to the site drop by almost 50 percent. Even more ominous was the decline in readership at sites such as DailyFinance and PoliticsDaily, two sites that AOL has been pinning much of its content hopes on…

At The Huffington Post, meanwhile, both traffic and revenues have been climbing. As I wrote in a post after the acquisition was announced, the site also brings two things to AOL that it desperately needs: an understanding of how much social networks and social features matter to new media, and a sense of personality and brand awareness that sites such as DailyFinance and PoliticsDaily — not to mention cookie-cutter sites like AOL Television and AOL Music — have so far failed to generate. Now all Arianna Huffington has to do is somehow graft all of that into AOL.