AOL reported third-quarter earnings this morning. Revenue was down 6 percent to $531.7 million. The company swung to a loss in terms of net income, losing $2.6 million, or $0.02 per share. Analysts expected a loss of loss of 7 cents per share. Disclosure: AOL is the parent company of TechCrunch.
But AOL was able to grow global advertising by 8%, driven by 28% and 15% growth in third party network and global display advertising revenue Tim Armstrong, Chairman and CEO said in a statement: “We continue to build strong consumer experiences as we execute our strategy to build the premium branded media company for the internet. Our share repurchases underlie our belief in the value of AOL and our strategy.”
Search and contextual revenue declined 15%. In local, Patch surpassed 10 million monthly unique visitors and 10,000 bloggers on its platform. Armstrong added about Patch, “We believe it’s a very good investment.” He added, “We’re headed to being one of the largest local and national providers of content.” The platform also has around 5,000 advertisers.
The Huffington Post launched or relaunched 18 properties and surpassed 35 million monthly unique visitors in Q3. AOL’s traffic as a whole was flat for the quarte; properties saw 107 million average monthly unique users, up 1 percent from last year. Traffic to the Huffington Post Media Group came in at 97 million unique users per month, flat from last year.
He also said the company is adding social and commerce components to advertising, and said that the AOL will be debuting a new social ad format for advertisers soon.
As of September 30, 2011, AOL had $444.1 million of cash.