Spanfeller’s departure comes amid a flurry of bad news for finance publications. In April, Condé Nast pulled the plug on Portfolio, its business magazine and Web site, after a very expensive two-year run. Earlier this week, publisher McGraw-Hill (MHP) announced that it was shopping BusinessWeek, and observers are floating the notion that the company may end up giving the magazine away to anyone who wants to take on its annual losses.

Time Warner’s (TWX) Fortune magazine has also been battered by the recession, which has been particularly hard on the finance, auto and luxury-good companies that business publications have traditionally relied upon. And Forbes itself has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs since last fall.

In a memo to the company’s employees, Forbes CEO Steve Forbes praised Spanfeller for building out the company’s Web property, which says it receives 18 million unique visitors a month.In the aftermath of the dot.com crash, Spanfeller helped turn Forbes.com, which the family-owned company was close to shutting down, into a powerhouse.

But Forbes’s plan to take the Web property public earlier in the decade never panned out. And once Forbes sold a 40 percent stake to private equity investors Elevation Partners three years ago, plenty of Forbes employees, including me, had speculated that Spanfeller would look for a job that promised a big payout. That said, it wasn’t that long ago that Spanfeller was the victor in a power struggle with Jim Berrien, the former publisher of the Forbes print edition.

The news was first reported by AOL’s Daily Finance. Here’s the company memo from CEO Steve Forbes:

To: All Hands

From Steve Forbes

July 16, 2009

Jim Spanfeller, President and CEO of Forbes.com has decided to step down from leading our website after nine years. In the entrepreneurial spirit that Forbes has always championed, Jim will be setting up his own media management company.

Describing his future plans Jim said, “The world of media has changed rapidly in the past 10 years and the velocity of the change promises only to increase going forward. I’ve had a great run at Forbes and have been deeply involved in the breakthroughs and transformations between traditional and digital media.  Now I see a huge opportunity to have my own media management business that will help other traditional media companies make the most of their enormous prospects in digital venues, taking all I have learned here in the past decade and applying on a wider horizon. Forbes.com has truly been a truly wonderful ride and I am deeply in debt to the Forbes family for letting me be a part of it.”

Jim has done a monumental job of bringing Forbes.com to the lead position in business websites, and secured Forbes.com as the must visit site for not only global business leaders but also anyone interested in the finest business reporting and analysis available. At present Forbes.com has 18 million unique visitors a month.

Along the way, Jim has overseen the development and growth of Forbes Digital, which includes Forbes.com, ForbesTraveler.com, Investopedia.com, RealClearPolitics.com, RealClearMarkets.com, Real Clear Sports, and Forbes Business and Finance Blog Network, which together reach 40 million unique visitors a month.

This immense growth on the digital side of the business was spearheaded, pursed, and led by Jim with enormous success. The digital world is still uncharted with few rules, and Jim’s intellect, creativity, and business acumen helped bring us our number one position. For this the Forbes family is very grateful and we wish him all the success in his future plans.

Since Elevation Partners partnered with Forbes three years ago, Jim has worked very closely with them on the growth and development and vision for Forbes.com.  Commenting on Jim’s departure, Roger McNamee of Elevation said, “Jim did a fantastic job leading Forbes.com. In an era when competitors feared it, Jim embraced and evangelized the internet, with huge benefits to Forbes and its audiences. We are grateful for his contributions over the past nine years.”

Jim will be staying through a transition period at least through Labor Day. Please join me and my brothers in wishing Jim all the best in the future, which he deserves.

I’ve seen stories touting big traffic spikes at Time Warner’s (TWX) TMZ, which broke the story; Wikipedia, which apparently was flooded with Wikipedians squabbling over the details of Jackson’s demise; and Gawker, which lives for this sort of thing. At some point, the man-bites-dog story will be a site that doesn’t report a huge spike in Jackson traffic.

In any case, here’s the latest one I’ve seen: Yahoo (YHOO) boasting that Jackson’s demise has been its good fortune. Here are the data, per Yahoo PR:

Yahoo! News:
· Yahoo! News set a record in unique visitors with 16.4 million UV’s in a day. Our previous record was on election day when we had 15.1 million visitors.
· Yahoo! News had 4 million visitors come to the site between 3-4 pm, setting an hourly record.
· Yahoo! News recorded 175 million page views yesterday, our 4th highest day after the Inauguration and Hurricane Ike.

Front Page:
· On our front page, the story “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was the highest clicking story in our history. It generated a whopping 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes and news of his death saw 560,000 clicks in 10 minutes. Also, the news area on our front page experienced five times the amount of traffic it normally receives.

Yahoo! Music
· Yahoo! Music’s blog post on Michael Jackson has generated 21K comments in under a day.

UPDATE: Here’s some boasting from CBS’s (CBS) Web group. Happy to keep adding to this if anyone else wants to do a little chest-beating.

· Since the news broke, Last.fm saw a huge surge in users streaming music tracks by Jackson. On average, users were streaming 43,000 Jackson tracks per hour. The Michael Jackson artist page has received heavy traffic with more than 30 page impressions per second as fans log on to pay their respects to the pop icon. The traffic for the artist page continues to increase, and the site continues to see more than 45 times the normal traffic.

· TheInsider.com reported record traffic for June 25, with an increase that was close to double compared to the previous week. Prior to yesterday, the record for high traffic was held on May 5 when the site shared revealing photos of former Miss California Carrie Prejean.

· Within 12 hours of the announcement, CBS.com saw 100% aggregate growth over the same day last year as fans turn to CBS.com for breaking news about the tragedy, as well as to link to CBSNews.com and THE EARLY SHOW for their streaming coverage.

· CBSNews.com traffic tripled during the hour in which Jackson’s death was officially announced (3 p.m. PACIFIC/6 p.m. EASTERN) on June 25 as people turned to the site to learn more about the circumstances involving his death.

And yes, this is the third Michael Jackson post I’ve written today. Which gives me an opportunity to embed a third Michael Jackson video. This one is the intro to the “Jackson 5ive” animated series from the 1970s, procured by our eagle-eyed Beth Callaghan. Enjoy.

[Image credit: Library of Congress]

That’s why this fine Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, available for as little as $9.78, became one of the online retailer’s most popular items in the last week. Prompted by a link at the IAC (IACI)-owned site, CollegeHumor readers bought up scads of the shirts, and filled Amazon (AMZN) with glowing reviews like these:

Unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather…

This is the only t-shirt Chuck Norris wears. Wolves howl at the moon, and the moon howls at Chuck…

…So I’m looking for threads that say, “Hey baby…I’m real boss!” when I stumble upon this epic creation. The wolves spoke to me in a language all their own; it was like German, Mongol, and Bitchin all mixed together. I mean, one wolf howlin at the moon is major…but three???

Why bother? If you have to ask, you’re probably never going to get the joke. More info via the Washington Post, including the most pertinent detail: As clever as the CollegeHumor dudes are, they neglected to actually figure out how to profit from the stunt themselves.

But while Hearst isn’t ready to declare victory, it does say that the first two months of seattlepi.com’s life have been “encouraging.” Via a press release, Hearst offers up a bevy of traffic stats that show the site has grown even as its staff has shrunk. Hearst doesn’t offer up any info about revenue, but does say that its “sales and marketing team is highly energized.”

I sincerely hope so, and I sincerely hope it works. I still don’t get the math: Hearst says seattlepi.com is attracting 4.3 million monthly unique visitors. Chris Batty, who runs sales for Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire, figures that traffic could support a staff of perhaps a dozen editorial workers at one of his sites–not the 20 or so that Hearst has working in editorial.

And bear in mind that Gawker’s titles have a national focus, not a regional one, which makes it much easier to sell than Seattlepi.com.  There may be a thriving business for regional/local online ads one day, and we’ve been hearing about the potential for many years. But it’s not there yet, and it’s not close.

Still, better to have Hearst says it’s encouraged than to have Hearst pull the plug after a few days.

Two months after becoming the nation’s largest newspaper to move to an all-digital news model, seattlepi.com’s year over year numbers show that it has more users this April than last April, when the Post Intelligencer was still publishing with an 80% larger staff, an amazing feat for an online venture with a newsroom of 20.

In April, its first full month of operation, seattlepi.com had 4.3 million unique visitors, up 1.6% from 4.2 million in April 2008 (source: Omniture). Total page views for the month were 37.3 million.

During the last week of April, the site broke its one-day unique user record since going online-only. There were 324,000 unique visitors on April 30—the 4th highest day in terms of unique visitors in 2009—breaking previous records set since going online only on April 29 (290,000) and April 27 (283,000). Total page views for those days were 1.5 million, 1.4 million and 1.5 million, respectively.

Two months into our online-only experiment, we are encouraged by this growth in visitors and expect our numbers to improve as we continue to establish new partnerships.

We get a lot of feedback from readers cheering us on and thanking us for continuing to bring them the local news and information they want and need. It’s great to see that not only have we not lost readers, we’ve actually gained new ones.

A new team of more than a dozen sales and marketing representatives and managers has been tasked with building advertising and marketing partnerships and creating a unique Seattle digital advertising agency.

Our sales and marketing team is highly energized to be working with such a vital and dynamic product. We will leverage existing partnerships with Yahoo!, Kaango, Metrix4Media, and others to create what is essentially a local digital advertising agency offering unique opportunities for business in the Seattle area and across the country. Advertisers and other partners understand that seattlepi.com is in an unrivaled, popular destination for news and information, offering tremendous value for exposing their products, services and brands to a large and very desirable audience.

Everyone who wondered why Randy Falco and Ron Grant were still running AOL gets an answer: Time Warner (TWX) was lining up their replacement.

Google (GOOG) sales chief Tim Armstrong becomes chairman and CEO of the troubled Web property, effective immediately.

The move is getting immediate cheers from current and former AOL employees I’ve talked to. The snap consensus is that anyone would have been better than Falco, a longtime NBC executive, and Grant, who was Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes’s chief lieutenant before being elevated to his role as President and COO of AOL.

But they’re particularly happy to see a sales guy running the organization: AOL once had a much admired sales operation. But in recent years, the group has been roiled, as a series of sales chiefs came and went. (From Kara Swisher, here are more details on the shakeup, and an interview with Armstrong. And here’s some early betting on Armstrong’s replacement at Google — former Doubleclick CEO David Rosenblatt has a lot of fans).

The current AOL sales chief, former Yahoo (YHOO) sales boss Greg Coleman, was installed just last month. He’s been deep into a reorg of his own.

It was desperately needed after AOL’s miserable performance in 2008, which concluded with a quarter that saw ad revenue drop 18 percent. But those plans may be up in the air now.

In any case, here is the full press release from Time Warner about the firing of Falco and Grant, after the jump:

NEW YORK, March 12, 2009–Tim Armstrong, Google Senior Vice President, has been named Chairman and CEO of AOL, LLC, Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes announced today. Current AOL Chairman and CEO Randy Falco and President and COO Ron Grant plan to leave the company after a transition period.

In making the announcement Mr. Bewkes said: “Tim is the right executive to move AOL into the next phase of its evolution. At Google, Armstrong helped build one of the most successful media teams in the history of the Internet–helping to make Google the most popular online search advertising platform in the world for direct and brand marketers. He’s an advertising pioneer with a stellar reputation and proven track record. We are privileged to have him preside over AOL as its audience and programming businesses continue to grow and its advertising platform expands globally. He’ll also be helpful in helping Time Warner determine the optimal structure for AOL.”

Tim Armstrong said: “I’m very excited about the opportunities presented in leading AOL. AOL has a wide-ranging set of assets and audience. The company is well positioned to enhance those assets into a larger share of the Internet audience and advertiser communities. AOL and Google have been partners for years and I look forward to collaborating with Jeff Bewkes and his team as we explore the right structure and future for AOL.”

Mr. Bewkes added: “Randy led AOL in its transition from a subscription business to an audience business. Under Randy and Ron, AOL’s programming sites exhibited year-over-year growth in unique visitors for 23 consecutive months with many of its sites now in the top five of their categories. They also assembled Platform-A, the number one display ad network in the U.S. with a reach of more than 90%. They also aggressively cut costs as they restructured the Audience business portion of the company into three distinct operating units: People Networks, MediaGlow, and Platform-A. As Randy and Ron move on, they leave AOL with our gratitude and appreciation for remaking the company and bringing it to a new and promising level.”

Tim Armstrong was a member of Google’s Operating Committee and served as the president of the Americas Operations. Under the Americas Operations, Armstrong’s team managed publishers and advertisers’ relationships and platforms with some of the world’s most widely recognized media and agency brands.  Armstrong started at Google in the year 2000 and opened the first office outside of the Mountain View, CA headquarters.

Mr. Armstrong joined Google from Snowball.com, where he was vice president of sales and strategic partnerships. Prior to his role at Snowball.com, he served as director of integrated sales & marketing at Starwave’s and Disney’s ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures, working across the companies’ Internet, TV, radio, and print properties. He started his career by co-founding and running a newspaper based in Boston, MA, before joining IDG to launch their first consumer Internet magazine, I-Way.

Mr. Armstrong sits on the boards of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the Advertising Council, and the Advertising Research Foundation, and is a trustee at Connecticut College and Lawrence Academy. He is a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s MediaNYC 2020 committee.  He is a graduate of Connecticut College, with a double major in economics and sociology.

ComScore says that traffic to the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC fell 10.8 percent from October to November, dropping from 5.3 million unique visitors to 4.8 million. (Hulu’s PR team notes that ComScore’s separate “VideoMetrix” panel assigned a much bigger audience to the site last month: 24 million uniques. They haven’t put out November numbers yet but I’ll update when I get them).

ComScore (SCOR) says U.S. traffic at Google’s (GOOG) YouTube also dropped that month, but by a much smaller margin–0.006 percent. And since YouTube is a global property, those numbers are less telling. Hulu, meanwhile, is a U.S.-only site (much to the dismay of blog commenters).

Apologies for not figuring out how to show you this data in graph form–I’ll figure it out eventually. For now, click to enlarge.

This makes plenty of sense: Hulu was one of two places were you could (legally) see the “Saturday Night Live” Sarah Palin clips, which were huge sensations. The other one, NBC.com, dropped a whopping 50 percent–from 14.1 million to 7.2 million, comScore says.

And all sorts of Web sites that enjoyed a bump during the run-up to the election have tailed off a bit since then. ComScore says the Huffington Post, for instance, is down 20 percent– from five million uniques to four million. Presumably Oak Investment Partners was aware of that before it sank $25 million into the site last month.

Meanwhile, Hulu still shows impressive growth. If I could have figured out how to create a graph, you’d see that Hulu has still had a huge run-up since March, when it left beta.

Speaking of beta, video site/blog punching bag Joost has logged its first full month of traffic since its Web video player became open to the public. ComScore pegs traffic at 1.1 million uniques; the company says that its data, which include global traffic, show 2.1 million.

Those aren’t huge numbers–I can think of several text-only blogs, which cost a lot less to build and operate than Joost’s site, that garner more eyeballs than that–but they’re not terrible either. Still, Joost has a lot of ground to catch up if it wants to give Hulu a run for its money.

Last but not least! Here’s an excellent clip from the smart folks at the Onion. It’s a month old, but news to me. Enjoy:

Instead, the New York-based company has just raised a $4.5 million Series B round that its CEO, 22-year-old David Karp, says will fund it for two and a half years. Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, which led the company’s first $750,000 round a year ago, also led this financing. My educated guess is that its investors now value Tumblr at around $15 million.

Tumblr is a “microblog” platform that is supposed to let its users quickly create nice-looking posts with a minimum of effort; it sits somewhere between Twitter and full-fledged blogs like Blogger and TypePad. It is popular with a relatively small but prolific user base: Its 500,000 users have created pages that draw 15 million unique visitors and 61 million page views a month, Karp says.

Money? Nope. Tumblr is free–and has no ads cluttering up its hipster vibe.

Way back in 2007, those kinds of numbers would have been catnip for the likes of Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO). Now, though, even deep-pocketed buyers aren’t racing to snap up revenue-free start-ups. But Karp says raising money from his previous investors was easy: “These guys came to us with a deal that made us incredibly comfortable.”

Karp says he’s going to start generating money in early 2009. Not by selling ads on his members pages–Karp thinks the site will eventually incorporate ads in some way, but not yet–but by selling users “premium” services, most of which he’s not ready to describe. He does promise they will be “really sexy.”

More practically, Karp points out that other Web services, like the WordPress blogging platform and Yahoo’s Flickr photo service, have been able to upsell many of their users with goodies like extra storage. He figures many of his users will pay up, too.

The new money means he’ll have time to prove his thesis. Karp has just doubled his staff–which means there are now all of six people on payroll. One of them, hired in September, is John Maloney, Karp’s former boss at Urban Baby, where he started his Web career. Maloney is now in charge of business operations.

The money also means there are heightened expectations. Karp has done much more than people twice his age (and has the press clips to prove it). But the newest funding round means his investors think the company will be worth as much as $50 million by the time he sells it or raises more cash. In order to prove them right, he’s got a lot of work ahead of him.

[Image Credit: David's Log]