The Seattle Post-Intelligencer went online-only a year ago, and the online venture is not yet profitable, according to Hearst Seattle Media general manager Pat Balles.

Balles says the site is on-track to soon turn a profit, but would not say when - and at least the site is not losing the $1 million a month the paper lost when it was a print operation, writes Poynter Online. (via MediaBuyerPlanner).

Advertising has made some progress, and the company is “encouraged by the feedback we are getting from clients on how we are meeting/exceeding expectations with their online campaigns,” Balles says.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer website averages around 4 million unique visitors per month, with 40 million page views, on par with what the site generated when the newspaper was still publishing a print edition. The fact that traffic has been relatively stable with what it was when Hearst published a print edition is good news for the company, considering that after the first month of being an online-only publication, unique users dropped significantly.

The newspaper may have chosen a good time to ax its print edition, as it likely would only have continued its steep declines in 2009. Across the U.S., newspaper ad revenue fell 26% in 2009, a rate of decline that was more than 50% steeper than a year earlier.

However, it was also a difficult year for newspapers’ online ventures. Newspaper online ads fell 10%. Papers responded by raising prices, which led to a total revenue loss of 22%.

Talk of going online-only was rampant among newspapers a year ago, but as the economy began to improve and the fourth quarter of 2009 saw a slow in the decline of ad spending, voices of doom in the newspaper industry have been stilled somewhat.