Great news from the AOL conference call yesterday:

• Now to AOL, our second strategic priority for last year. During the year, we repositioned AOL as a primarily advertising-driven business and this strategic shift has already yielded strong financial results. AOL’s ad revenue grew 49% in the fourth quarter, and 41% for the full year, to reach a total of almost $1.9 billion. For the last nine months of the year, we believe our ad growth was faster than the industry average, which of course means that AOL was taking share for the first time in many years.

Folks may have had issues with how long it took for Jon to turn around AOL, or his style, but the fact is that in 2006 he pull AOL’s growth way ahead of Yahoo’s and behind Google’s.

For the record: second to Google is first place these days.