That sent Yahoo shares dropping twice as fast as the tech-heavy Nasdaq index, a sign of shareholders' displeasure at the idea of paying that much. 24/7 Wall Street thinks that anything more than $5 billion will be viewed as overpaying. Growth in AOL's advertising business is slowing dramatically, as the Internet-access business continues to decline.

The only part of AOL that anyone seems interested in is its online-advertising network, born as Advertising.com and recently relabeled Platform-A; Yahoo, too, fancies itself an advertising broker, in imitation of Google's hugely successful AdSense program, which places ads on third-party sites and gives Google a cut of the resulting fees. AOL's Web-publishing businesses? The most-trafficked ones are duplicated by Yahoo's own, more successful media sites in area like sports, news, and finance.

And then there's dial-up Internet access, a business no one seems to want. Liberty Media might flip its shares in Time Warner for the business, but only at a bargain price. Yahoo might take it in a package deal, to save the complication of a split, and try to trade the subscribers to someone like Verizon or AT&T in exchange for a long-term advertising deal.

So who gets cut? Either Time Warner's shareholders, or Yahoo's, depending on the price that's paid. This deal seems likely to get done, if only because it becomes more embarrassing the longer it takes. But someone's going to end up with their fingers sliced.

AOL will make some of its ad-banner space and partner sites' inventory up for bid in an online auction. Advertisers will be able to make cost-per-impression, cost-per-click, and cost-per-action bids. The good news for advertisers looking for cheaper alternatives in a tough economy — such as General Motors, which just announced it plans to cut online ad spending — is that the process will remove costly "friction" from the ad-buying process. The bad news for publishers: "Friction" is another word for "profit." Another concern: Allowing advertisers to buy space on their sites through ad networks will discourage them from developing relationshps with their highly paid salespeople.

When PaidContent reached Platform-A boss Lynda Clarizio on the train home from work, she said AOL only made the move to rationalize the division's contracts with publishers. After the integration, Tacoda's behavioral-targeting tech will be Platform-A's behavioral targeting tech. A single contract will let AOL fill ads spots it can't sell via Tacoda with Advertising.com's remnant ads, but CPM rates should stay the same, Clarizio said. Clarizio and other Advertising.com insiders opposed the Tacoda acquisition, believing their behavioral-targeting technology could command a similar lift in ad rates, so there's some pride-swallowing being done here. But the ouster of Tacoda's executives and the neutron-bomb elimination of two-thirds of its staff should salve that wound.

Since we made the guess that Clarizio might be the a candidate to take charge of Microsoft's online division, insiders have laughed it off. Clarizio's a lawyer by training, they note — the ultimate diss in the tech world. But if this kind of inwardly directed knife-sharpening isn't what's called for in Redmond, we don't know what is.

It's a way for the buy side to match what's happening on the sell side. The sell side is consolidating in these big platforms and Publicis thinks it needs to organize its buying to hook into these platforms so Google doesn't have all the data. Clients have lots of data. Their agencies need to be able to organize that data to better run campaigns.

Very informative, no? We asked Morrissey if anybody's ever told him he should write about the ad industry for a living. "If Twitter doesn't work out, totally looking into it."

the success of campaigns on our popular products, such as SuperPoke!, Top Friends and FunWall, has attracted the attention of not only top brands, but also top talent like Jason.

If only attention were as good as cash. Then Slide might be more than the online version of the musicians in every corner of New York's subway system — amusing, nice to have around while waiting for a train or a page to load, but hardly worth $550 million. U.S. marketers spent a paltry $600 million on social media advertising in 2007 — the same amount Procter & Gamble will spend over two months on its entire marketing budget and a tiny fraction of the $18 billion spent on interactive advertising last year. Somehow, we don't think a bunch more SuperPoke inventory flooding the market is going to fix the problem.(Photo by bk . ninja)

Probably not. For one thing, brokering ads, while trendy right now, is a lower-margin business than selling ads on a website a publisher owns. AOL will have to split any profit with Verizon. And Verizon's inventory, like AOL's, is likely heavy on pageviews from Web-based email and other low-value traffic.

Tacoda, the company whose acquisition brought Viebranz to AOL, had promised to boost significantly the value of ads on those pages. Executives at AOL's Advertising.com unit, including Clarizio, were skeptical of Tacoda's claims, and opposed the acquisition. After Viebranz's ouster, Clarizio now has to prove what insiders at Advertising.com argued: They could do a better job than Tacoda at making money from those ads.