I would sum up this puff piece on the so-called new AOL as “we’re big, we’re bad, we’re AOL”.

But AOL, often derided as the original gated community, is now manufacturing a broad array of digital media that is free for the grabbing. There are 300 working content producers in its New York headquarters, backed by hundreds of other freelancers and programmers in Bangalore, Dublin and Dulles, cranking out copy and editing photos for more than 80 Web sites. Ten are ranked in Technorati’s top 100. Politics Daily, which began in April, already has 3.6 million unique users a month, while Politico, a much more established name, has 1.1 million. In the aggregate, the media properties at AOL have about 76 million unique visitors.

[From The Media Equation - AOL Builds Content as Mainstream Media Falters - NYTimes.com]

Here’s the problem for AOL, which the NYTimes apparently doesn’t see because they themselves have the same issue: it’s not how many people are hitting your URL, it’s what they do with you once they get there that matters. While community may be the most abused and mis-used word in media at the moment, engagement matters more than ever and the best brands in media know it. AOL is, for the most part, fighting the last war by focusing on unique users and pageviews. If either of those stats actually mattered anymore, well the newspaper business would be a growth industry right now.

Suggesting that your place on the Technorati Top 100 is a proof point for your success is pretty lame, just as much so as reciting your traffic stats. How about some new stats that measure how viral your content is, as in propensity to be shared directly by visitors or on other topically related sites, and depth of engagement that measures, beyond time spent, what site visitors are doing when they get there, like commenting, clicking on sponsor links, etc.?

So while AOL is trying to be Huffington Post, by bringing individual authors and brand names under one masthead, Huffington Post itself is going to personalized news in a big way with their Facebook Connect initiative. Poor AOL, always a day late and a dollar short…