The owner of the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and Patch reported higher advertising sales and a one-time gain on a patent sale helped it return to a profit. Quarterly net income was $970.8 million, compared with a loss of $11.8 million a year earlier. Since the Web portal was spun out of Time Warner in 2009, CEO Tim Armstrong has been trying to transform AOL into an advertising-based publishing business. The stock had advanced 82 percent this year through Tuesday.