Here’s some good news to start the weekend with: Aol’s Patch sites have doubled their traffic this year. Forbes reports that visitors to the entire Patch.com network hit 6.9 million in April, which is pretty good considering where traffic was prior to that:

According to ComScore, Patch’s 800 sites attracted a collective audience of 6.9 million unique visitors in April. Now, that’s not terribly impressive on a per-site basis, and it pales in comparison to Huffpo’s audience of almost 30 million. But it’s a big jump from where Patch started the year: It had just over 3 million uniques in December 2010 and just a hair under 4 million in January.

Everyone has to start somewhere.