WebProNews

Companies are always trying to pass off deceiving statements or misleading data, and we pride ourselves on being suspicious types.  January AOL numbers have been presented by Frank Gruber, however, and they look pretty good in terms of both believability and AOL's performance.

Gruber, the senior product manager of myAOL, writes, "I know it is only one month but it is a heck of a start to a new year and it is tough to not to at least be intrigued by the positive start."  So let's head to the data.

The most spectacular growth, percentage-wise, took place at the AOL property called Asylum; page views are up 158 percent, according to Gruber, and growth in unique visitors isn't far behind at 110 percent.  Moviefone, for its part, saw an increase in page views of 81 percent.

Meanwhile, some of the things more closely tied to AOL's name also did well.  "AOL Music took the top stop in the music category in both total unique visitors and page views which grew 32% to 427 million," writes Gruber.  As for AOL Money & Finance, "In December we moved to 2nd place in the finance category, from number 3, where we remain and are moving closer to catching the top slot."

And, even if we prefer Intentional Foul, "AOL Sports . . . had the 4th month of consecutive growth in Page Views as it grew 23% to 175 Million, while uniques are up 11%.  Since redesign, has moved from 6th overall into 4th overall in the category."

Once again, we're not looking for AOL to overtake Google anytime soon.  But these numbers appear to demonstrate that AOL's doing all right, and - perhaps with a bit of a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" to any multibillion-dollar corporations who are watching - might not be a terrible acquisition target, either.