Pathfinder, the monolithic Web site for Time Warner's extensive collection of magazines, is being broken up and mined for raw materials. Time acknowledged it is folding the Pathfinder operation, a pioneering attempt to establish a separate, online brand for the media giant, in favor of promoting and extending its individual magazine brands. Time New Media is downplaying the move, which it calls an outgrowth of its online direction of the past year or so. "This exactly matches the strategy we have been pursuing for 18 months now," said a Time New Media representative who did not wish to be named. "We haven't spent a cent advertising the Pathfinder brand for 18 months, or tried to bring people to the Pathfinder site. It's all been promoting the individual sites." Pathfinder was built in 1994 with the idea of putting all the content of Time Warner in one convenient place. The idea was that users were still figuring the Web out, and would have an easier time of it if they only had one Internet address to remember. But Time says that that's no longer a problem. "We didn't realize how powerful our brands themselves were," the representative said. "Now it seems each brand is like a flag. Whether or not you read Time Magazine, you know that you can go to Time.com to get up-to-date headlines." The transition, which will take place over the next six to nine months, will mainly involve the technical challenge of removing the cgi scripts that now drive each separate URL -- such as entertainmentweekly.com -- to a place in the pathfinder.com hierarchy. Industry observers have been highly critical of Time Warner's catch-all approach with Pathfinder, noting that the site forced Time Warner to build up an entirely new brand. "It was a bad idea in 1994, it was a bad idea in 1995, and it was a bad idea in 1996," said analyst Barry Parr of International Data Corp. "They have some of the best-known media brands, and they buried them... Why doesn't Sports Illustrated have the same popularity online as ESPN now? It's because they didn't get it." And by keeping all of the company's resources under one roof, Pathfinder also limited the revenues the company could garner from its content. "Pathfinder has been losing money hand over fist," commented analyst Julia Pickar of Zona Research in a recent interview. "They have to figure out a better way to leverage all Time Warner content, other than just sticking it up on a site... they're in for a much better chance of leveraging their content if they ... get multiple revenue streams from where they place it."