Michael Learmonth

Last week's Supreme Court decision on campaign financing will be good for the media business.

Considering cutting your Cablevision subscription? It's not just the cable industry that would rather you didn't.

uSocial will deliver you 5,000 Facebook "friends" for 7.6 cents per friend ($654.30), or up to 10,000 Facebook "fans" for a mere 8.5 cents a fan ($1,167.30).

On Wednesday, Microsoft and Yahoo are expected to announce a new search agreement that could trigger a major re-ordering of the online ad business and create what they hope will be a more-credible competitor to Google.

Most of the many, many sites aggregating other people's content can't deliver much traffic, and some don't even try. What's more, a vast swath of readers couldn't care less about anything deeper than a headline [are you calling headlines shallow?], which is a problem for the nation's beleaguered journalistic institutions as they try to find a sustainable model for newsgathering on the web.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes hopes to put more TV on the Internet, but he's going to make consumers prove they've paid for it. He has a plan to put all cable programming on the web in places such as Hulu, MySpace, Yahoo TV, or even YouTube.

Every publication now must compete with every other around the globe, many of which are willing to offer their content for free. They also face competition from thousands of aggregators, who take journalists' content, monetize it for their own profit, and, in many cases, give little or nothing back to its originators.

The web is about to get a little more like TV -- minus the ad-skipping. ABC.com has started to peddle research that shows online viewers will tolerate shows with ads from multiple sponsors, much like TV.

He's the second-richest man in the world, after Warren Buffett -- worth $60 billion by Forbes' measure -- a man who parlayed Mexico's one-time state-owned telephone monopoly into a business empire so dominant that it accounts for a third of the value of the leading Mexican stock market.

The American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers, the Direct Marketing Association and the Interactive Advertising Bureau are joining forces in a bid to head off government regulation of online advertising.