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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BusinessWeek employees are waiting to hear if they’ll have jobs once Bloomberg takes over the publication, and I’m told that staffers expect to hear their fate shortly after Thanksgiving. That has to be unnerving, but I can at least offer a little bit of comfort in the worst-case scenario employees would be facing had they been purchased by private equity firm ZelnickMedia. The short version: Almost everybody gets fired.

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Many newspaper publishers say the ad sales slump has stopped, but not at Wapo: Both print and Web ad declines accelerated over the last quarter. Newsweek, meanwhile, saw its ad sales drop by half.

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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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Remember Microsoft’s plan to use “Family Guy,” Fox’s ribald, off-color cartoon sitcom, to promote Windows 7? No more, says Microsoft, which is pulling out of plans to sponsor a special episode of the show scheduled to run Nov. 8. What happened? Apparently, Microsoft realized that “Family Guy” is a ribald, off-color sitcom.

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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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Condé Nast is still in layoff mode, but that hasn’t stopped the publisher from putting together an app worth writing about. It’s part of a digital magazine strategy that actually makes some sense.

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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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There 85,000 apps available. So how do you get Apple to highlight yours in national TV ads?

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Good news (potentially) for T. Rowe Price and the other investors plowing $100 million into the revenue-free start-up: The service’s users absolutely love clicking on ads, says a new study.

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Start-ups whose business plans are based on selling advertising are having a very hard time raising money. But start-ups that want to make money by helping other people sell advertising? That’s another story.

Today’s example: Rubicon Project, a Los Angeles-based advertising-optimization start-up, has raised a $9 million C round led by Peacock Equity, the joint venture co-owned by GE Capital and GE’s NBC Universal.

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Adam Carolla, the former CBS radio host who started a podcast once he lost his job, has figured out how to turn his talent and Internet audience into money. He’s going back to work for CBS.

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Google is about to flip the switch on its long-awaited Ad Exchange.

The search giant will reportedly open up its AdX service, which is supposed to bring together ad buyers and sellers the same way a stock market does, within the next two weeks. AdX isn’t a surprise, but it is a big deal.

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Here’s a front-page story the New York Times would rather not be running: The paper is warning readers to be aware of bogus ads running on its Web site.

The paper says “some readers” have seen unauthorized pop-up ads promoting antivirus software on NYTimes.com, and warns visitors who see the ad not to click on it but to restart their browsers instead. While the Times doesn’t spell this out, it has likely had its site hijacked by a “malware” scammer who is trying to trick visitors into installing pernicious software onto their hard drives.

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