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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The new conventional wisdom is that sooner or later, consumers will have to start paying for some of the stuff they currently get for free on the Web.

But will they actually pay up? Here, the conventional wisdom is not so helpful. Nor are studies predicting consumer behavior.

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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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Digital music entrepreneurs Dave Goldberg and Bob Roback, who built up Launch Media in the 1990s and ran Yahoo’s music group for much of this decade, are trying their hands at tunes again.

This time, though, they’re not trying to convince consumers to pay for music or asking advertisers to subsidize it. Instead, they’re trying to act as a middleman between labels and publishers who own music and advertisers, Hollywood and other folks who want to use the tunes for commercial purposes.

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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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The New York Times’s model for content creation, which revolves around well-paid professionals who rely on their experience and judgment, looks increasingly threatened. What does a new model look like? Perhaps one where a computer spits out assignments to day laborers who work furiously for low pay.

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Is there anything you people won’t watch online? Doesn’t look like it, based on the newest Web video numbers from Nielsen. While stats show that the overall size of the Internet video audience has increased by 12 percent in the last year, the amount of video consumed has shot up 25 percent.

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Employees at News Corp.’s MySpace have been waiting to find out who their new ad sales boss will be. And, here she is: Nada Stirratt, who until today was running digital sales for Viacom’s MTV Networks.

Stirratt has her work cut out for her. The struggling social networking site, HQed in Beverly Hills, has been trying to reboot its image, spur innovation in its product and, most of all, pull itself out of a too-long slump, even as longtime rival, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook, has seen explosive growth.

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I’ve been reporting a steady drip of cautiously optimistic forecasts for the ad business, but this one is less sunny: A JP Morgan survey of ad buyers says they’re unlikely to boost spending until next year.

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Barry Diller has tried just about every gambit possible to boost his Ask.com search engine, but he keeps coming up with more. The latest: Coupons.

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Steve Ballmer says he doesn’t expect to do much search-related M&A, which makes sense since there’s little left to buy. But he may be willing to pay for search. Ask AOL.

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Want to learn how to steal your favorite movie or TV show? A 10-minute video starring a Paramount executive offers detailed instructions.

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Google and Yahoo both expect mobile ads to provide big boosts. Time to rethink that notion, says Bernstein Research’s Jeffrey Lindsay, who says mobile will be a modest niche business for the big guys.

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Of course, Time Warner’s AOL has hired yet another Google veteran. That’s what the company does under the Tim Armstrong regime. Today’s example: Shashi Seth, the one-time “monetization” boss at YouTube, who was most recently running sales at Cooliris. His new job: Senior vice president of global advertising products, reporting to Armstrong’s lieutenant (and Google vet, natch) Jeff Levick.

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