Nope. Advertising was down 21 percent at TheStreet (TSCM) during its last quarter, and the company expects things to get worse. “Early indications suggest that the year-over-year decline in advertising revenue that we saw in the fourth quarter will increase in the first half of the year,” Chief Financial Officer Eric Ashman predicted in the company’s earnings release.

But wait: Unlike other online businesses, TheStreet isn’t completely dependent on advertising–it sells expanded access to its content via subscriptions. Won’t that help? Nope. Ashman: “The pressure on the subscriber base is likely to continue as many investors are no longer market participants, and job reductions in the financial sector reduce the pool of interested consumers.”

The one bit of hopeful news: TheStreet has a nice cash pile–$76 million at latest count–and no debt, and there aren’t many media companies that can say that. But that isn’t impressing investors, who don’t seem to think the company is worth much more than its cash on hand. As of yesterday afternoon, they were valuing the entire operation at a little under $81 million.

Huffpo’s newest round values the company at about $100 million, which means its investors think it will be worth much more one day. That’s the same value, more or less, that investors place on TheStreet (TSCM), even though it generated some $65 million last year and has about $80 million in cash on hand. McIntyre:

Huffington has several important advantages over TheStreet. For starters, it does not rely on one person for most of its traffic. If Jim Cramer left TSCM, the company would be in real trouble.

Second, Huffington has diversified beyond it political news base. Over the next year or so, it will become clear whether that was a good idea or not. Adding “style” and “entertainment” sections puts it into competition with a lot of other online success stories.

Third, Huffington aggregates a lot of content from around the web. The cost of doing this is remarkably low. The company pays little if anything to most of its bloggers. TheStreet has a relatively large staff and produces most of its own content.

The final difference between the two companies is probably the most telling. At its current rate of growth, which could be hurt by the end of the 2008 election process, Huffington may double in size again over the next year or so, if its efforts to diversify its content works.

It would be hard to find analysts who believe TSCM is going to expand its audience or revenue at a rate of 100%.”

I can think of some counter-arguments to this, but they’re half-hearted: TSCM’s affluent readers should be worth more to advertisers than Huffpo’s; TSCM still has a revenue stream from subscribers to buffet it from ad market turmoil; Huffpo’s aggregation model isn’t unique and could be replicated by anyone who wants to hire some devilishly clever Web editors, etc.

But better to acknowledge that the HuffPo crew have built something very big, very fast. And that anyone who does that gets rewarded for it, even in an econalypse.