• The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, August 16, 2011 12:46 PM

The good new for AOL, as The Wall Street Journal reports, is that top advertisers, including Unilever, Ford and Best Buy, see promise in AOL's strategy, and plan to boost spending on AOL sites as part of overall increases in digital-ad expenditures. The bad news is that AOL has so far failed to sufficiently increase traffic to its hundreds of Web sites, while it faces more competition from social-networking sites and new technology-focused methods for buying digital ads.

AOL is presently spending about $160 million a year on Patch, which equates to about $150,000 to run each individual Patch site annually, analysts tell WSJ. Bigger picture, "boosting traffic is crucial to capturing ad spending," the newspaper notes. "Traffic to AOL sites rose just 3% in June, according to comScore ... with increases to its newer properties, such as the Huffington Post and local Patch sites, barely making up for steep declines at its legacy sites, such as the AOL.com home page and mapping site MapQuest."

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »