SAN FRANCISCO » AOL Inc. reported a $1 billion-plus second-quarter loss and tumbling revenue yesterday, yet the dismal-sounding numbers appear to belie a more positive reality: The troubled Internet company is actually chugging along on its long road to recovery.

AOL is in the midst of a turnaround effort under CEO Tim Armstrong, a former Google Inc. executive who is trying to shift AOL from relying on a shrinking dial-up Internet business to finding growth in online ad sales.

So far, this has not been easy. Since splitting from Time Warner Inc. in December, the company has shown few obvious signs of progress, and on the surface the second quarter may sound like more bad news.

AOL reported $1.4 billion in write-downs for the declining value of its assets and the sale of social networking site Bebo. The company’s advertising revenue fell even faster than it did in the first three months of the year.

Still, Armstrong remained resolute about AOL’s chances for survival, saying he believes the company in the past year has "moved the needle from ‘survive’ to ‘thrive.’"

Armstrong said that the writedown doesn’t point toward problems at AOL, but rather indicates that "the patient is getting healthier."

"If you look underneath it, it’s really about cleaning up what happened during the AOL-Time Warner years," Armstrong said in an interview.

Some analysts agreed.

David Joyce, an analyst at Miller Tabak & Co., called the quarter "a mix of positive and negative," and said there are "some signs of improvement starting to show through."

AOL bought Time Warner at the height of the dot-com boom back in 2001, hoping that Time Warner’s TV and magazine content would fit with AOL’s dial-up Internet business. But the rise of speedier broadband Internet connections started killing off AOL’s main revenue source. After years spent trying and failing to integrate the two companies, Time Warner finally spun off AOL.

The change has not been easy, as AOL’s second-quarter results make clear. The company reported a net loss of $1.06 billion, or $9.89 per share, in the April-June period, compared with net income of $90.7 million, or 86 cents per share, a year ago.

And revenue sank 26 percent to $584 million from last year’s nearly $792 million — far lower than the $602 million analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected, on average.