Oh. And don’t bother counting your home in that total. FT Wealth is for people of real means. The kind who are still “liquid,” as Gordon Gekko put it.

In other words, the kind of people who might want to read about “whisky as an alternative investment, Muslim philanthropy, how the downturn is affecting the lifestyle of America’s rich kids and expensive sports.” All of which are on tap for the supplement’s October issue, which will reach 100,000 of the newspaper’s U.S. subscribers.

If you’re a down-on-your-heels skeptic with no imagination, you could note that the kinds of advertisers that are supposed to keep a supplement like that afloat have had a rough go of it in the recent past. So have high-end financial magazines (Portfolio, RIP).

Big-thinking optimist? Then you’ll note that Fortune magazine launched in the Great Depression, and that ended up working out pretty well for the company that’s now Time Warner (TWX).

That’s the conclusion Citigroup’s (C) Mark Mahaney reached after taking Microsoft’s (MSFT) new search engine for a spin and comparing it to Google’s (GOOG) and Yahoo’s (YHOO). The result: Google still delivers better results most of the time. In 71 percent of searches, Google either supplied the most relevant answer or tied with other engines. Bing did that 46 percent of the time.

But it’s worth checking out the results of Mahaney’s test to see exactly how the search engines stack up. For one thing, as he notes, Bing’s results are getting better as it matures–it’s only been live for about a month–and as it adds bells and whistles (for instance, it is catering to vanities of certain bloggers by including their Twitter stream in search results).

And Bing also performs better for at least two kinds of searches: Health and travel. So if you need to book a trip, or if you pick up a rash on that trip, you might want to think about Binging before you Google.

First, Mahaney’s methodology:

Over the past two weeks, we conducted 200 queries across the three major Search engines–Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Most of the queries we picked came from Google Zeitgeist, Microsoft’s xRank and Yahoo! Buzz, along with some personal queries. These queries spanned multiple categories, including Entertainment, Health, Local, News, Retail, Sports, Travel and Other. After conducting the same query across all three Search sites, we picked a winner based on: 1) relevancy of the organic search results; and 2) robustness of the search experience, which included factors such as image and video inclusion, Search Assist, and Site Breakout.

And his results. Overall relevancy (click to enlarge):

Relevancy by topic (click to enlarge):

BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine, who broke the story, has most of the relevant details, but here’s an important one I didn’t see: ESPN reps tell me that the magazine accounts for less than 10%  of the content available on ESPN.com. So most of the stuff that people are used to getting for free at ESPN.com will remain free at ESPN.com.

That fits nicely with the free/pay thesis I’ve been chewing on for some time now — in the future, a relatively small number of people who are wealthy and/or passionate about something will pay to access some Web content, and the rest of us will be happy to settle for free stuff, which will need a very big audience to survive.

But I’m not sure how that will pan out with ESPN’s magazine, which seems to fall in the middle ground. I just picked up a copy last week — when I travel, I like to treat myself to a couple print magazines — and it’s nice read. But it doesn’t have the specialized stuff that allows, say, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to charge for its Green Bay Packers “Insider” site, or even the data-heavy stuff that ESPN’s Insider sells to fantasy sports nuts and/or gamblers. Or, for that matter, the fantasy sports stuff that ad-happy Yahoo (YHOO) still sells.

And if memory serves, this is actually a reversal back to an old strategy — several years ago, as I recall, only print subscribers had access to the magazine’s online pages. Be interesting to see if anyone’s more willing to pay for it now.

UPDATE: A little more nuance, via some people knowledgeable with ESPN’s thinking. Internally, the company thinks of the move as a way to bolster its paid Insider product, since anyone who ponies up for Insider will get the magazine for free. And the company and will end up shifting some resources from the magazine to the Insider.

Most sports/Web/mobile experiments have way too many caveats to make them really interesting–last month, when Time Warner’s (TWX) Turner let iPhone users stream the NBA All Star game, for instance, it wasn’t letting them watch the actual telecast of the game, just a series of alternate takes. But this is the real deal–you’ll see the actual CBS telecast, for all the games, commercials and all.

Of course, there are still asterisks with this one. It only works with WiFi, not a 3G wireless connection, which means you have to be fairly close to a computer to watch this on your phone. So why not watch it on that computer? Also, it’s not gratis: CBS (CBS) is selling the “NCAA March Madness on Demand” app for $4.99 on Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes store.

It’s an interesting inversion of the clichéd-but-true “analog dollars for digital pennies” phenomenon, whereby traditional content loses value as soon as it moves to the Web. In this case, CBS is asking you to pay money for something you could normally get for free.

But consumers, or at least early adopters who ingest content on their mobile phones, seem OK with this proposition. Presumably, that’s because they’re trading cash for convenience. I’m not quite sure how this will play out with college basketball, where those who really care about the games are going to get themselves in front of a big screen. But it’s cool to have it available, period.

Yup, more of the same: Holiday sales from Nov. 1 through Dec. 19 are down one percent compared to the same period in 2007. Which is right in line with comScore’s (SCOR) prediction of flat online sales for the holiday.

If you’d like a rosier glow to these numbers, comScore tries to oblige, by noting that average online spending between Thanksgiving and Dec. 19 is actually up five percent per day. But since there are fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year compared to previous years, that won’t help retailers’ top or bottom lines.

What are people buying on Amazon (AMZN) and other electronic storefronts? Fewer flat screen TVs, ComScore says, either because promotional discounts have tapered off or because those who need a 42-inch LCD on their walls have already got one.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure what constitutes an online “Sports and Fitness” purchase, but ComScore says people have been making many more of them this year, because the category is up 31 percent. Music, movies and videos are much more familiar, and much less popular. Sales are down 24 percent, which mirrors what Best Buy (BBY) said about its brick and mortar sales for the same goods earlier this month.

It’s no surprise, obviously, that financial advertising has slowed down in the first three quarters of 2008. The surprise is that it’s only been a 10 percent reduction (so far), according to Nielsen.

There are also some interesting breakdowns: Mortgage and loan companies spent 62 percent less (of course). But credit service companies increased their spend by 22 percent, and investment service companies boosted their spend by six percent.

Here’s Nielsen’s list of top 10 financial advertisers (click chart to enlarge): Note that Bank Of America (BAC), one of the comparative winners during the meltdown, has cut its spend by 30 percent so far this year–slightly more than teetering Citigroup’s (C) 26.5 percent cut. Previously left-for-dead ETrade (ETFC), meanwhile, bumped up its spend by 24.5 percent.

Want more unpleasantness? OK. Comes now yet another ad executive to tell you that next year will be very unpleasant for anyone looking to make a living off of advertising revenue.

U.S. advertising spending will drop 5-8 percent next year, says Steve Lanzano, chief operating officer of MPG North America, a unit of French advertising conglomerate Havas SA. Lanzano predicts that sports advertising, long considered one of the most impervious to downturns, will get roughed up as well:

Even television sports, which have become more popular with advertisers since audiences tend to watch the events live rather than recording them, will suffer from the broad pullback in marketing spending, said Lanzano.

Lanzano estimated 9 to 10 percent of spending on broadcast sports comes from financial services and automotive, both industries that have been in turmoil. ‘That’s a lot of money moving out,’ said Lanzano.

‘Because of the hits in the categories that support sports–whether it’s financial or automotive or retail–I think they might take a little more of a hit than they would in other recessionary periods,’ he said.”

OK. Let’s break the glumness up a bit, shall we? If you’re looking for a cheap laugh, head to the Hollywood Reporter’s take on the Nielsen numbers. Then feast your eyes on the unintentional, yet very successful contextual advertising placed to the right of the story (which is where I borrowed the image currently at the top of this story).