Yesterday, Viacom told Wall Street that its third quarter had been better than most analysts expected. Today Time Warner delivered a similar report: Revenue was on track, but cost savings improved the bottom line. That won’t help hundreds of Time Inc. employees who face job cuts this quarter. Meanwhile, the company can’t ditch AOL soon enough: It has already spent $100 million prepping it for a spinoff this year.

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Here’s another quick glimpse of the advertising market, courtesy of Viacom. The cable giant says ad sales are still down, but that the rate of decline is slowing. And in the fall of 2009, that constitutes pretty good news.

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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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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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Is Hulu putting up a pay wall around its Web TV site? Nope.

Does Hulu want to charge people to watch Web TV? Yes.

Confused? Don’t be.

Here’s the explanation about what’s going on at the premium online video site.

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Want to get Michael Jackson’s new single? You will be able to get it on iTunes this month, contrary to earlier reports. But there’s a catch: You’re going to have to buy some of the late singer’s other songs, too.

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Last month, Warner Music Group won the right to sell ads on its YouTube videos. Next step: Getting someone to sell ads on its YouTube videos, since the music label doesn’t have its own sales team. The plan: Hand those duties over to someone who’s already doing it for Veoh and other video outfits.

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The good news: Two of music’s biggest acts helped slow the industry’s sales slump last quarter. The bad news: It’s still slumping. And the Fab Four and MJ are probably out of tricks.

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Time Inc. has spent the past few months convincing other publishers to join a new joint venture aimed at a market that doesn’t really exist yet–magazine-like publications to be delivered via e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet. Publishers like the idea. What will Apple and Amazon say?

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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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Here’s your daily dose of goodish news about the Web ad business, courtesy (again) of Mark Mahaney, who says display ads are perking up. Or at least some of them are.

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Warner Music and YouTube, co-owners of the one of the Web’s nastiest spats, are about to patch things up. How’d they do it? By cutting a deal that looks a lot like the one YouTube has already made with Universal Music Group.

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It took Apple a year to move its first 1.5 billion apps from its iTunes store. It took a mere 76 days to move the next 500 million.

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Vevo, the music industry’s attempt to create a Hulu-like hub for its videos, is going to attract a lot of eyeballs when it launches later this year. Here’s the guy who’s supposed to attract advertisers: David Kohl, a former Nokia executive who starts work today as the site’s sales boss.

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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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