Here’s your half-empty/half-full stat for the day: Four in 10 consumers don’t want to see ads on their phones. Is that good or bad for the nascent mobile ad business?

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Little by little, AOL is offering investors more and more details about what the company will look like after it spins off from Time Warner. But the more AOL discloses, the less attractive the company looks. The newest problem: AOL’s steady flow of Google money is going away.

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Are the folks who put together “The Office” clairvoyant or what? These things are written and shot many weeks in advance, yet last night’s episode contains a perfectly timed reference to the News Corp./Google paywall controversy.

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If you’re someone who gets paid to market to people who use YouTube, there’s a good chance you already know about TestTube, the site’s suite of experimental services. The rest of us will find interesting novelties, like “Insights for Audience”: A nifty way to find out what people like–or unlike–you are watching.

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The newest twist in Google’s quest to wring more more money out of YouTube: Ads you don’t have to look at. That’s a refreshing change of pace, no?

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Add one more voice to the chorus of conventional wisdom: The Web ad market has stopped getting worse, but it’s going to be a while before it starts getting healthy.

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AppNexus, an ad-buying “platform,” has raised $5 million in round led by Kodiak Venture Partners, along with Venrock and First Round Capital. The company is one of many trying to take advantage of “real-time” bidding for Web display ad inventory.

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Why did Google start labeling blogs as “blogs” in its search results? Eric Schmidt thinks it may have to do with your mother.

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Did Rupert Murdoch wait way too long to fix MySpace? It’s easy to get that impression from the News Corp. earnings call today.

The takeaway: The site is losing traffic and money and is going to get at least $100 million less from Google than it once thought. “It’s a work in progress,” News Corp. says, over and over again.

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Here’s the counterpoint to Publicis’s mildly optimistic take on the ad market yesterday: Rival ad-holding company Interpublic Group’s report, which is mildly pessimistic. But the takeaway is the same: If things get better, anyone who’s not Google won’t see much real sign of it until next year.

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Microsoft bought ad exchange company AdECN more than two years ago. And unless you’ve been paying very close attention, that’s the last you ever heard of it.

This should finally change next year. People familiar with Microsoft’s plans say the company intends to open the exchange for business in January, which will allow online ad buyers and sellers to match up in real time. That will put it several months behind Google, which opened up its ad exchange in September.

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It’s all well and good for Google to say the worst is over. But what about media companies that survive on revenue streams other than search ads?

Things should be better for them, too, says Publicis, one of the biggest advertising companies in the world. The French holding company, which announced its results today, says things bottomed out this summer.

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Here’s a good way to get your hands on scarce venture capital money: Create a start-up geared around Twitter-like “real-time” sharing and conversations. The newest entrant: Hot Potato, a buzzy start-up that’s supposed to let users converse about a particular event, whether they’re attending it in person or watching from afar. When it’s up and running, that is. The five-man crew doesn’t have users or a product just yet. But it has just raised around $1 million.

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It’s easy to get the impression that everyone uses Twitter. And many people do! But new statistics indicate that four of five Web users are still Twitter-free. Worth keeping in mind as Google and Microsoft start plugging tweets into search results.

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Google insists, over and over, that it has no intention of getting into the content business. So how is it finessing its way into the music business? Very carefully.

The search giant is working on a new service that will provide searchers with streaming music, which sounds a whole lot like a content play at first blush. But Google will only be offering limited bits of music, and it will be relying on other companies–Lala.com, MySpace’s iLike and Imeem, sources say–to actually provide the tunes.

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