That soft January 2009 growth rate comp helped January 2010 Mac sales grow an astonishing 36 percent year over year, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster observes in a research brief this morning. It’s likely, then, that an even softer February 2009 growth rate comp will do the same for February 2010 (see table below; click to enlarge).

“The month of Feb-09 was -16% y/y, the softest Mac comp we’ve seen since we began tracking the data 5 years ago,” Munster writes. “We expect the strong y/y growth in NPD data that we saw in Jan. to continue in the month of Feb.”

Munster continues to expect Mac sales ranging from 2.6 million to 2.8 million in first quarter of calendar 2010. That’s an 18 percent to 26 percent increase over the same period in 2009, which was down one percent year-over-year.

That’s per Huffpo’s own numbers, served up by Google Analytics (GOOG). And as usual, outside auditors provide a different number. ComScore’s (SCOR) January numbers put the site at 26.4 million unique visitors (see breakdown at bottom of this post).

But no matter how you count it, there’s now a really, really big audience for a site the smart set derided as a vanity project for Arianna Huffington when it launched in 2005.

You may also recall predictions that Huffpo would wither after the 2008 elections, but that hasn’t happened either. So what’s driving the growth?

Verticals, says Huffington–the mini-Huffpos the site has been pumping out on a regular basis. The site’s technology and sports sections, for instance, didn’t exist six months ago. Now they account for 10 percent of Huffpo’s traffic, she says. (Did you know ultimate fighter Chuck Liddell has a nude workout tape?)

Other big hits: Comedy (up 58 percent in the last six months), style (37 percent), entertainment (25 percent).

Huffington was less boastful about the site’s attempts to roll out local sections. That started with Chicago in August 2008, and now includes Denver, Los Angeles and New York.

But she’s not sure where that will go next: “This year [we] have prioritized launching other sections, which has been a great decision,” she says. It’s possible that Huffpo will launch more local sites, or it may partner with other sites instead.

Huffington’s competitors and/or detractors would also want to point to the site’s team of technology wizards, which allow it to extract the maximum value out of a relatively small (100 full-time employees) staff. Huffpo has mastered the art of turning other people’s work into its own stories and eyeballs.

But eyeballs are eyeballs. Next up: Turning them  into dollars. That’s up to sales boss Greg Coleman and his brigade of Yahoo (YHOO) veterans.

That’s an impressive spike and one that continues a three-month streak of gains that began last November after a worrisome period of stagnation between September and October (click on chart and table below to enlarge).

Hard to believe that comScore’s measurements for January 2009 showed Twitter.com with an estimated six million visitors. With 67.5 million more just a year later, the site’s annual growth rate is a jaw-dropping 1,107 percent.

[Image Credits: comScore, Scarletbits]

Let’s see if the paper’s executives can turn that around during their earnings call. We’ll also be looking for any updates the Times can provide on its pay wall plans, and, of course, its role in the launch of the Apple iPad.

UPDATE: As I noted below, though the New York Times (NYT) was a featured partner at the launch of Apple’s (AAPL) iPad, even sending a small team to Cupertino to create an app a few weeks before the event, there was zero discussion about iPads today.

CEO Janet Robinson made a generalized comment about the growth of the Times’s mobile distribution, but that was it. And not a single analyst showed any interest in this stuff–a good reminder that neither the Times nor Wall Street expects the iPad to be material to the company’s business for quite some time.

Liveblog

On the call: CEO Janet Robinson, CFO Jim Follo, Times Media Group boss Scott Heekin-Canedy, and Digital boss Martin Nisenholtz

In a preamble, CEO Robinson highlights cost-cutting, balance sheet repair, and asset sales (radio station, but not the Boston Globe; the company is still looking at selling its stake in the Boston Red Sox–the process is “complicated” and is “taking longer than anticipated”).

Robinson recaps the pay wall plan, metered approach, etc. Nothing new here so far.

The paper is waiting until 2011 to deploy the pay wall, she explains, because it wants to make “subscribing as smooth and easy as possible….It will take some time to build, deploy and test the best systems.”

Robinson offers a few revenue details, primarily a recap of the earnings release.

Ads by category: National ads down 12 percent, retail down 23 percent, classifieds down 27 percent.

News media online grew four percent, primarily from display advertising (the rest of online growth comes from About.com).

Print ad category decreases came from Hollywood, among others. Ad category increases: Print auto, health care, packaged goods.

Circulation revenue is up because of newsstand, price increases. The Times is benefiting from declines at other papers, because as local papers cut back, it is offering more info than ever. Robinson notes expansion by the paper into local news in the Chicago and San Francisco markets, adding that there are plans on going local in “several” other key markets

Time to brag about new mobile products and applications. The paper counted 75 million page views from mobile and apps in December, and the iPhone app has been downloaded three million times since launch.

Back to digital: Display ads are up, classifieds down; they improved “significantly” as Q4 progressed.

About.com is still the Times’s digital cash machine: Revenue is up 22 percent, and operating profit grew from $10 million to $18 million.

Overall, Internet businesses are up 10 percent and accounted for 15 percent of revenue for the quarter. Online advertising revenue accounted for 23 percent of ad revenue of the quarter.

“Limited” visibility for 2010, which is what’s upsetting The Street, supposedly. But the paper is still “realigning” its cost base.

CFO Jim Follo’s comments may not interest all readers except for this part: The Times is continuing to reduce headcount, he notes, which dropped by 18 percent in 2009. The company is also looking at the benefit structure for both employees and retirees. It froze that awesome supplemental retirement plan that pays certain retirees a very lucrative pension.

We’ve been benefiting from a drop in newsprint prices last couple years, Follo notes, though suppliers are trying to raise prices again, but there’s a supply glut, so we think they’ll have a tough time doing that.

No big capital spending projects are planned. [Presumably, the pay wall is not that expensive to build.]

[Aside: Interesting that NYT.com GM Denise Warren, who's normally on these calls, isn't on today's.]

Questions and Answers

Question: More color on advertising, please.

Scott Heekin-Canedy: We have some optimism, but advertisers are “guarded,” and ads are still bought–or retracted–at the last minute, as they were last year.

Tech, media, health care, and auto ad categories all look promising. The mix is “definitely different” from last year “when it seemed like every single category was down.” Now, many categories are showing “flat to significant growth.”

Question: Are you still optimistic that you can reach a deal on the Red Sox?

Robinson: “Yes we are.” Lots of due diligence, lots of different properties (stake in team, stadium, network, etc.).

Q: What are incremental costs of setting up a pay wall?

Robinson: “We feel this is an elegant solution,” but we want to wait the year and make sure we’re well prepared, etc. Again, integrating home delivery and digital is crucial.

Nisenholtz: Regarding cost, there will be a “modest operating cost” to deploy the tech. We’re hiring a “handful” of people to do that and deploying “modest” capital, but it’s not material.

[Apology: I missed a question on ad categories, though it seems to reprise the earlier question.]

Q: Can you give us a sense of additional cost-savings you can extract this year?

Follo: Nope.

Q: Will your headcount go down again in 2010?

Follo: Yes.

[Missed another question here.]

Next a question about the tax rate, which I can’t imagine anyone reading this cares about.

Q: Can you tell us more about January ad trends, i.e., how much is national vs. local?

Robinson: We won’t break that out (anymore).

Q: Was it materially better than Q4?

Robinson: She repeats her earlier comments from the release. “Very good performance” on the digital side of business. December was particularly good, but we’re not going to be more specific about January.

Heekin-Canedy: That said, we don’t think January is much of an indicator about the rest of the year, anyway. Different beast, not much connection between December [when people were dumping leftover dollars].

[There's a giant disconnect between analysts and the chattering classes here. If the latter ran the call, this would be about nothing but iPad, iPad, iPad. But we're 48 minutes in, and zilch so far. Which is a good reminder: No matter what launches with the tablet this year, this stuff isn't going to have a big impact on Big Media for quite some time.]

Q: Where is growth coming from at About.com?

Robinson: Both consumer packaged goods and display ads. We’ve upgraded the sales channel to go after display and that’s helped a lot.

Nisenholtz: Strong categories include CPC, travel, education and financial services. There’s also retail strength.

Q: Are CPGs new to About.com?

Nisenholtz: Yeah. Well, not exactly. It’s a big site, lots of reach. But we’ve updgraded the sales team and the increase there is part of the payoff. We reach a lot of moms. The Web site skews female.

Q: You may end up paying $60 million to $80 million back into the pension plan. When could that come? Q4?

Follo: Could be sooner than that. We’re in a good position regarding liquidity.

[The final question is about joint ventures that you don't care about.]

And that’s it for the call.

According to comScore’s (SCOR) January 2010 core search volume and market share data for the U.S.–as reported by J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan, Bing’s share of the search market rose to 11.3 percent from 10.7 percent in December. Meanwhile, Google’s share fell to 65.4 percent, from 65.7 percent in December and Yahoo’s to 17 percent, from 17.3 percent. Not significant declines by any means (though Yahoo is down 21 percent year-over-year), but nice little breadcrumbs for Bing to snap up just the same.

Which is not to say that Microsoft (MSFT) will be able to parlay its advance into more meaningful gains. Certainly, it will continue to be dwarfed by Google (GOOG) for the foreseeable future. But perhaps not by Yahoo (YHOO), particularly given the discrepancies in their core search volume. In January, Bing saw its core search volume increase by 49.6 percent, up slightly from 49.4 percent in December. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s core search volume decreased by 8.9 percent, considerably more than the 1.9 percent decline it suffered in December.

At $2.99 a pop, and after subtracting Apple’s 30 percent fee, that’s about $39,000 in revenue for the publisher, which isn’t even enough to rehire anyone the company let go during last fall’s layoffs.

And those sales numbers are puny compared with the title’s analog reach: GQ reports average newsstand sales of more than 200,000 per issue, plus more than 600,000 paid subscribers.

But they’re enough for Condé to declare the digital magazines, designed to be consumed on iPhones and iPods, a “success out of the gate.” For now, that seems plausible for two reasons.

For starters, this is a Big Media digital product that doesn’t cut into the existing analog offering. The company isn’t exactly sure whether digital buyers cannibalized print numbers, but its hunch is that they did not, and that seems right to me.

Second, it doesn’t matter from a financial perspective. That’s because Condé has convinced advertisers to credit both sales equally. And selling digital copies via iTunes is much more lucrative than spending money to print and distribute paper copies.

Just as important: While Condé won’t say so out loud, sales of the first few GQ iPhone issues have given the company confidence that it will be able to port the app to the iPad, or whatever Apple (APPL) calls the tablet it plans to unveil next week.

The ported app won’t be as flashy as the digital demos of tabletized magazines Condé and other publishers have shown off–it’s pretty much a literal translation of the magazine into digital form–but it’s a start.

The eye-popping stuff, meanwhile, will take some time to build.

In a research note this morning, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster hazards a guess, putting the odds of the company hosting a special event at 75 percent and the odds that Apple (AAPL) will use the event to debut a tablet-like device at 50 percent, with an eye toward a March release date.

“Based on new media reports of trademarks connected to Apple (iSlate, Magic Slate), and our own conversation last week with with a Taiwanese component supplier, we are reaffirming our expectation that Apple will likely ship a tablet device by the end March,” Munster writes. “We believe there is a 75% chance Apple will host a January event and a 50% chance it will be held to announce the tablet.”

And if Apple does announce such a device, what can we expect from it? Largely what we’ve been hearing recently, says Munster, who outlined his own expectations for an Apple tablet in another research note issued earlier this month. “We expect the tablet hardware to be similar to an iPod touch but larger (about 10″); we expect the key differentiator of the device to be its software,” Munster wrote.

“While there are several options ranging from a touch screen Mac OS X to an iPhone-like OS,” the analyst elaborated, “we expect the tablet to be driven by a new version of Apple’s iPhone OS that runs a new category of larger apps alongside all the current apps from the App Store. We believe Apple’s tablet would compete well in the netbook category even though it would not be a netbook. Rather it would focus more on apps, entertainment content (from the iTunes Store), and web surfing.”

That would make for a pretty compelling device at the right price point. Indeed, says Munster, “we believe Apple could sell about 1.4m units if the tablet shipped in March, adding 2 percent to revenue.”

Add this to the news that Apple has reportedly booked the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco “for several days in late January,” according to the Financial Times, and it’s pretty easy to connect the dots: It’s a very good bet we’re getting a look at this thing within the next 30 days or so.

A mobile industry source tells me developers have been told that while the mystery device will be shown off at the event, it won’t be ready to ship (Dan Frommer at Alley Insider relays the same news).

Announcing a product before launch used to be unusual for Apple (AAPL), but it’s a pattern the company has practiced more recently, notably with the first iPhone. And if Apple is indeed coming out with a new product that will require developers to rethink their approach, it makes a lot of sense.

I’ve asked Apple for comment, but I’m not holding my breath.

My source says Apple’s instructions to developers indicate that the tablet–or at least the thing the company is showing off next month–will be based on the iPhone OS and rely on the same iTunes Store that has moved two billion apps in a couple of years.

If so, it will mean that some people who have been guessing at what Apple is planning may need to go back to the drawing board.

Magazine publisher Condé Nast, for instance, has been working on a digitized version of Wired magazine that would run on Adobe (ADBE) software. But the iPhone’s OS doesn’t work with Adobe’s Flash platform, and if that holds true here, Condé Nast (and Adobe) is going to have to think of something else. Same goes for many Web video distributors who rely on Flash.

But first things first. Let’s take a look at this thing, whatever it is, and see what it actually can and cannot do before we get too far ahead of ourselves.

At least, if you’re looking at the market for smartphone ads and “in-app” smartphone ads–as defined by AdMob, the smartphone ad company Google is buying for $750 million.

Also those caveats aside, compare these two charts from AdMob’s November and October reports, respectively. First, here are the October data measuring advertising activity on AdMob’s network, by operating system:

And here are the November data:

So Google (GOOG) is still trailing Apple (AAPL) by a wide margin, but it’s moving quickly–20 percent to 27 percent in a month is awfully fast. And bear in mind that the search giant was at a mere seven percent not too long ago.

If you want, you can raise an eyebrow about AdMob’s potential bias, given its new owner-to-be, but for a long time the big knock on AdMob’s data was that it was too Apple-centric. In any case, there appears to be something happening here. Let’s see what happens in the January report.