At a TVWeek conference in Manhattan, Bewkes repeated arguments he has made in the past: Chiefly, that big media mergers have a lousy track record and that he couldn’t see how Comcast (CMCSA) could unlock any value by buying a majority stake in NBC Universal from GE (GE).

“Somebody has finally noticed that these things don’t work out so well,” he said, adding “We love to see our competitors taking risks.”

But just to hammer that point home, Bewkes compared the proposed deal to the one his company made nine years ago when it embarked on an ill-fated merger with AOL. That deal (made when Bewkes was running Time Warner’s HBO unit)  “basically made no sense” at the time, he said.

The main talking point in favor of that transaction–that connecting Time Warner’s content with AOL’s Internet distribution would create synergy–was “nonsensical,” he said. But “these kind of arguments, you’ll hear some of them this week, in the other merger that we’ve been talking about,” Bewkes said.

Clear enough?

Wall Street, by the way, remains unimpressed with the proposed deal as well: Comcast shares are down about 10 percent since word got out.

In other reiteration news, Bewkes also said, again, that he doesn’t plan on selling his Time Inc. publishing unit. Though he left himself a tiny window of wiggling room by noting that “no public company can ever say that it wouldn’t consider restructuring some part, whether it’s Warner, HBO, whatever.”

But Bewkes insisted that Time Inc.’s best-known magazine brands, including “Time, People, Sports Illustrated, InStyle,” are holding their own as print products and that the challenge will be turning them into online successes.

“We have basically a healthy business in terms of our relationship with readers. These brands mean something and they’re evolving…,” he said. “If you can’t take the leading titles that people have known for decades, and use the new world to make them relevant, really, shame on us.”

Now, three years after Google (GOOG) plunked down $1.6 billion for the video site, it seems to have figured out an approach that works for at least some big players: Hand over a chunk of the site to content creators, who get to control it, sell ads on it, program it with their stuff and share some of the ad dollars.

It’s a pretty straightforward compromise: YouTube gets some of the ad dollars that “premium” content–stuff you’d see on a TV screen, basically–can generate; content creators get access to the the gazillion eyeballs that the world’s biggest video site attracts. Examples: See the pacts that Sony (SNE), Disney (DIS), Time Warner’s (TWX) Turner, Warner Music Group (WMG) and Universal Music have hammered out in recent months.

And that sounds like the deal that YouTube and Britain’s Channel 4 have reached. Telegraph:

YouTube and Channel 4 have been in talks for at least the last six months and a contract is expected to be signed imminently. The Telegraph understands that Channel 4 has negotiated the right to sell its own advertising around its content on YouTube and share the revenue with the Google-owned site.

A senior television source close to Channel 4 said: “It was key for Channel 4 to be able to sell the advertising around its own inventory so it could extract maximum value from the deal and retain commercial control over its own property.

“When the Channel 4 content formally appears on YouTube, it will be branded exactly the same way as it is on the Channel 4 website. It will be a fully Channel 4 branded space and look as if someone has picked up 4 on Demand (Channel 4’s online catch up service) and put it on YouTube.”

…The partnership will be the first formal arrangement YouTube has agreed with a British broadcaster in which the majority of its content will be shown in full on the video-sharing site.

No comment from YouTube. If the report doesn’t pan out, I’m assuming it won’t have any impact on anyone reading this in the U.S.: The Web is worldwide, but these content deals tend to be specific to various territories, which means you won’t be able to watch British programming from the States. Fair enough: My non-U.S. readers always gripe about not being able to watch Hulu clips.

Khan’s estimate is the first one I’ve seen floated in public so far. The analyst has proven to have a pretty good grip on AOL’s business to date, so I’m taking it seriously.

But for the record, note that not only is the $4 billion number a pittance of the company’s value during the original Web boom (remember those days?), it’s also marked down from the $5.5 billion Google assigned to the company when it wrote down its five percent stake earlier this year. Which was, of course, a markdown from the $20 billion value Google (GOOG) had given it in 2005.

UPDATE: Pali Capital’s Rich Greenfield also pegs AOL at “around $4 billion.” Greenfield is also in the growing group of people who think Time Warner is likely to sell off its Time Inc. publishing unit. I think otherwise, but this will be interesting to watch.

Here’s how Khan got to his number (click chart to enlarge).

The deal puts Skype’s overall value at $2.75 billion, a bit more than the $2.6 billion eBay paid for the company in 2005. That current value is about five times the unit’s 2008 revenue of $550 million.

Skype’s new owners: Silver Lake, the Silicon Valley-based private equity group; Index ventures, the London-based VC firm; Internet entrepreneur Marc Andreessen’s new Andreessen Horowitz fund; and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Here’s the press release.

The buzzy microblogging service has just grabbed its highest-profile Google (GOOG) exec to date: Alexander Macgillivray, a deputy general counsel at the search firm, is coming aboard as Twitter’s top lawyer.

Macgillivray is best known as the lead Google attorney on high-profile intellectual property cases like its fights with book publishers, the Associated Press and Viacom (VIA). Twitter has yet to find itself mired in that sort of thing, but give it time.

Macgillivray is just the latest Googler to land at Twitter. Earlier this year, the start-up nabbed Doug Bowman, the search giant’s lead designer, to join the ranks of several other Googleplex veterans, including, of course, co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone.

There are lots of reasons to leave a big company for a scrappy start-up, but just to spell out one obvious one: If you’re into risk, there is a whole lot more upside at Twitter these days.

The company’s last funding round pegged its value at $240 million, and if it ends up being acquired in the next few years, that number could be much higher. But Google shares stalled long before last fall’s stock market collapse (click chart to enlarge):

[Image credit: Doc Searls]

Instead, the New York-based company has just raised a $4.5 million Series B round that its CEO, 22-year-old David Karp, says will fund it for two and a half years. Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, which led the company’s first $750,000 round a year ago, also led this financing. My educated guess is that its investors now value Tumblr at around $15 million.

Tumblr is a “microblog” platform that is supposed to let its users quickly create nice-looking posts with a minimum of effort; it sits somewhere between Twitter and full-fledged blogs like Blogger and TypePad. It is popular with a relatively small but prolific user base: Its 500,000 users have created pages that draw 15 million unique visitors and 61 million page views a month, Karp says.

Money? Nope. Tumblr is free–and has no ads cluttering up its hipster vibe.

Way back in 2007, those kinds of numbers would have been catnip for the likes of Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO). Now, though, even deep-pocketed buyers aren’t racing to snap up revenue-free start-ups. But Karp says raising money from his previous investors was easy: “These guys came to us with a deal that made us incredibly comfortable.”

Karp says he’s going to start generating money in early 2009. Not by selling ads on his members pages–Karp thinks the site will eventually incorporate ads in some way, but not yet–but by selling users “premium” services, most of which he’s not ready to describe. He does promise they will be “really sexy.”

More practically, Karp points out that other Web services, like the WordPress blogging platform and Yahoo’s Flickr photo service, have been able to upsell many of their users with goodies like extra storage. He figures many of his users will pay up, too.

The new money means he’ll have time to prove his thesis. Karp has just doubled his staff–which means there are now all of six people on payroll. One of them, hired in September, is John Maloney, Karp’s former boss at Urban Baby, where he started his Web career. Maloney is now in charge of business operations.

The money also means there are heightened expectations. Karp has done much more than people twice his age (and has the press clips to prove it). But the newest funding round means his investors think the company will be worth as much as $50 million by the time he sells it or raises more cash. In order to prove them right, he’s got a lot of work ahead of him.

[Image Credit: David's Log]

Those would be the Web publishers, large and small, that hand over some of their ad space to Google (GOOG), which generally fills it with its ubiquitous text ads. Kim Scott, who runs AdSense sales, would like those publishers to know that Google knows times are tough, and that it wants to help, and that it’s improving AdSense all the time, and that they should hang in there.

Nothing wrong with the note–it’s always good form to send customers a little pick-me-up. But since most publishers we know use AdSense as an ad solution of last resort–because they have extra space to sell, or because they have no way to sell space, period–it’s hard to imagine a missive like this will be very persuasive.

Here’s the note , courtesy of VentureBeat’s MG Siegler:

Dear Publisher,

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

We’re focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new products and features. We’re also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.

Sincerely,

Kim Scott
Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043″