First Stewart hinted that their cooking skills were superfluous, since Google gave them three free meals a day. Then she asked whether they got laundry and drycleaning service like they do in California. "They're going to be asking for this in my office!" she exclaimed. Martha's nightmare, as we know, is employee entitlement creep.

Publishers are bad-mouthing ad networks, only to offer the smaller publishers who really need them their own networks instead. That's not cutting out the middleman to protect brands — that's steering away interlopers from outside the media business, while jealously guarding their relationships with Madison Avenue. Either way, smaller publishers which can't afford their own salespeople will get taken to the cleaners. It's just a question of who drives.

Google will put AdSense against almost any content. Watching Google make its billions, rival ad networks decided they should too, flooding the market with inventory sold at ever-dropping rates. The problem with Google search, in which ads only show up when customers literally ask to see them, is that now all ad-supported Web companies and ad networks think they can create technology that will target advertising equally as well — even though Google search-ad targeting is just a crude keyword match, constantly improved by click-through data.