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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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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More upbeat–but not too ecstatic–chatter about the state of the Internet advertising market this morning from Wall Street: Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuth is raising his estimates for Google, citing “improving macro conditions [and] a stronger ad market.” Other online advertising bulls: Investors, who have been pushing up Google stock for months, and CEO Eric Schmidt, who has declared that the worst is over.

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CEO Carol Bartz explains what Yahoo is getting for its $100 million ad campaign, its first global marketing effort, which was launched today in New York during Advertising Week.

Here’s the rundown of Bartz’s press conference on the branding blowout.

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Is the ad market really starting to rebound? Or is the (muted, cautious) happy talk we we’re hearing this spring just happy talk? Time to take a peek at Google’s quarterly earnings this afternoon, which might give us some insight.

As per Google’s last report card, Wall Street is expecting the company’s revenue to decline from the previous quarter–unthinkable for Google in prior years, but now no longer a shock. But Wall Street will be looking for both numerical and qualitative hints that things are getting better, or at least have bottomed out.

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It has been three months since Zenith Optimedia revised its ad market forecast downward. Which means it’s time to knock it down once again. The ad buying firm now thinks the market will shrink by 8.5 percent this year, which is worse than the 6.9 percent decrease it predicted in April, which was worse than the 0.2 percent decrease it threw out in December. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, of course. But anyone want to bet on what happens in three months?

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A bad quarter for Disney, but it could have been worse–at least Wall Street was expecting it. After factoring out one-time charges and write-offs, Bob Iger and company earned 43 cents a share on revenues of $8.1 billion. Wall Street had been looking for 40 cents and $8.15 billion, respectively. The bright spot for the entertainment conglomerate is the same one you see at every media giant these days: Disney’s cable business.

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Newsflash: More data confirm that ad spending was really bad last year. But ad execs–at least those in certain industries–say things may be bottoming out this spring.

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Yesterday the New York Times won five Pulitzer Prizes and executive editor Bill Keller took a well-deserved victory lap with a speech that reportedly had his newsroom in tears. But for better or worse, none of that matters to investors, who are trying to figure out what the company’s long-term prospects look like. In the near term, they look terrible.
In the first three months of this year, the company saw ad sales drop 27 percent, and the Internet no longer helps: Web ad sales were down 6.1 percent. The company says to expect more of the same, for a while.

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Media giant Zenith Optimedia says the ad market is in worse shape than it had previously suspected. This is what Zenith Optimedia, along with just about every other ad forecaster, has been saying every three months or so for the past year. So it’s hard to get worked up about this stuff. The upside is also old news: Online advertising is doing better than traditional ads.

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Google is letting advertisers who buy AdWords–its main revenue engine–automatically buy mobile advertising, too. The company says AdWords buyers can choose to have their AdWords automatically show up on phones that support “real” Internet browsers like T-Mobile’s G1 phone and Apple’s iPhone. That’s a relatively small market, but one that’s growing fast, and Google’s first real opportunity to show that it can make money on mobile.

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TheStreet.com is worth about $100 million. So is The Huffington Post. But investors are much more optimistic about one of these Web businesses.

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