Earlier this morning, AOL delivered its third-quarter earnings report, and while there were significant problems, the company was able to impress investors.  AOL’s stock is now up 6.05 percent, which is more than a decent way for it to start the day.

That increase is in part due to the fact AOL was able to report $563.5 million in total revenue, even though analysts thought the company would just report $557.0 million.  Also, thanks to the sale of Kayak and ICQ, AOL managed to report $171.6 million in profit – a 132 percent year-over-year jump.

This led CEO Tim Armstrong to state, "In Q3, AOL continued on the path towards better health through targeted acquisitions and smart dispositions, meaningful product improvements, site relaunches, and strategic partnerships, all of which will enable us to execute more quickly against our strategy."

Then a couple more positive things to note are the just-announced hirings of Curtis Brown and Erynn Petersen, who will serve as Senior Vice President of Engineering for AOL Media, and Vice President of Developer Evangelism, respectively.

Unfortunately for AOL, it did lose 24 percent of its subscribers between the third quarter of 2009 and the third quarter of this year, and revenue dropped by 26 percent.

Still, its stock is well ahead of the Dow, which is only up 0.08 percent so far this morning.