But there’s one thing that even the most ardent Facebook fan can’t argue with: Facebook advertising is very much a work in progress.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Facebook itself: “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” the company says in its IPO filing.

If you’re a Facebook bull, those words sound reassuring. Facebook sold $3 billion worth of ads last year, and it’s just getting started. Imagine what happens when things really kick in.

But if you’re a skeptic, and there are lots of them, that uncertainity is a real problem. When Google went public in 2004, it had already built AdWords, the search ad engine that still generates the majority of its revenue today. Facebook doesn’t have an AdWords, so it doesn’t have a tried-and-true plan it can present to advertisers: Put dollars in here, see results over there.

Instead, Facebook marketers try different things over time. A few years back, they were all building Facebook apps. Then they started concentrating on amassing fans/followers. Now, digital marketing people tell me with confidence that all of that thinking is outmoded, and that the real Facebook pros are the ones who create “engaging content” on the site, then buy ads to “amplify” that message.

Facebook’s challenge gets even tougher because instead of search ads, whose success and failure are easy for advertisers to evaluate — Did someone click on my search ad? If they did, did they buy something or fill out a form once they got to my site? — Facebook aspires to the big branding dollars that advertisers spend on TV. And those are much harder to score. So convincing GM or anyone else to move big money from traditional ads, which marketers are at least comfortable with, to the wild world of social, requires a lot of work.

The good news for Facebook is that it’s so big that it might succeed even if it never cracks the social ad code. Any Web site with 900 million users and counting, who spend a ton of time there, is going to pull in a lot of ad dollars through sheer force of gravity. If Facebook can keep its users happy, it may get away with muddling through on the ad part.

But being a big, lumbering giant that attracts ad dollars without knowing what it’s doing isn’t the message Facebook wants to sell to advertisers. Or to investors.

OK, on to the “this isn’t that big of a deal” arguments. I’ve heard a bunch, all of which come from (different) people who don’t want to be quoted.

• Obviously there’s a backstory here. If GM didn’t want to keep advertising on Facebook, it didn’t have to announce that three days before an IPO.
• Big Fuel, GM’s social media ad agency, didn’t do a good job. That’s why GM fired them in December. For the record, here’s a quote from a Big Fuel rep: “GM never seemed persuaded of the value of social media in general and Facebook likes in particular. In a sales-driven culture, it is very hard to wrap your head around putting money in places where you don’t see immediate results in an uptick in sales.”
• Starcom, GM’s media buying agency, didn’t do a good job. That’s why GM fired them in January.
• How the heck did GM spend $3 on Facebook “content management” for every $1 it spent on Facebook ads, as the WSJ reports? That’s a sure sign that someone was doing something wrong.
• Ford loves Facebook.
• GM is pulling $10 million out of Facebook. Facebook did more than $3 billion in ads last year.

Again, all of those may be valid points.* But if Facebook really wants to allay outsiders’ fears, it needs to be able to prove conclusively that its ads work, in a scalable way, for a wide variety of advertisers. It can’t do that yet.

*I’m totally amazed by the $3-to-$1 ratio, and am wondering if it’s not to late to pivot myself into a “Facebook content creation consultant.” Those numbers also remind me very much of the late 90s, when companies like Organic went public based on the fact that they knew how to build Web sites and their clients didn’t, and they could charge accordingly. That didn’t last long.

That can’t be right, can it?

Not exactly. That scenario is what Gawker’s Scott Kidder encountered when he read a story on Adweek’s site today, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen.

Instead, Kidder should have had a choice of filling out a one- or two-question survey or sharing the story on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Bug, not a feature, says a Google spokesrep, via email:

Generally, Google Consumer Surveys are designed to show a market research question along with an alternate, publisher defined action, such as signing in or sharing a piece of content. Along with the surveys, we also offer a number of controls to prevent abuse of the system. Unfortunately, in rare cases, as a result of these controls, a prompt runs without a survey question included. This is not the intended behavior and we are currently working on a fix.

[UPDATE: This is now fixed, a Google rep says.]

Okay, fair enough. As far as the survey that AdWeek users are supposed to see, which acts as an ersatz pay wall by generating a small fee for AdWeek and Google every time someone fills it out: Annoying and a little clumsy, but not terrible.

I’ve read about the tool, and I’ve used it several times, but each time I encounter it I think something’s broken on the site. Then I remember what’s happening, make a couple of clicks without giving it a lick of thought — today’s survey was about professional medical supplies, I think, but I really have no idea — and move on.

Hard to see how this is useful for the survey sponsor, but I’ve always found online sponsor polls to be baffling. So perhaps it’s a less-bad option.

In any case, it’s a couple of clicks, so I’d prefer that to having Adweek crap up their site with slideshows, or forcing me to make lots of clicks to read a one-page story, which happens all over the Web these days. I also prefer it to Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” via “social readers,” which end up automatically belching up my friends’ reading habits into my feed, whether or not either of us wanted that to happen.

And in the big picture, unless the site you like is using the “borrow money from investors, pay back by selling to Facebook” plan, you’re always going to end up paying something to use it.

Either you pull out your credit card, or you lend them your eyeballs so they can rent them out to advertisers. And if you don’t like those options, you’re going to end up with a much emptier Web.

Curalate’s pitch: You need basic information about the way users and potential customers are interacting with your products on Pinterest, but it’s very hard to do it on your own, because users usually don’t identify the products they’re “pinning,” so there’s no effective way to search for your stuff.

The company says it can solve that with image-recognition technology, which it licenses from a  third party, and an analytics engine it created itself.

Curalate’s arrival is inevitable, because every big social platform eventually spawns a set of third-party analytics/brand tracking companies — see Twitter, Facebook. But the company didn’t exist a few months ago.

Up until late last year, Gupta’s company was called Storably, and it was pursuing another hot start-up meme, as an “Air BNB for parking and storage.”

But that one never got traction and, after six months, Gupta — a Philadelphia-based Wharton grad — looked for a pivot. He and his four-man team cast around for a new idea and, after considering some 70 ideas, landed on Curalate. At the end of 2011, the company raised a $750,000 seed round from NEA, First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures.

Now Gupta says he has 150 customers, including Kraft Foods and Time Inc.’s “Real Simple,” and he charges them up to $99 a month for his services.

That will happen in the middle of 2014, says Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar, when circulation growth at the paper will start offsetting the decline in the Times’ ad sales. Here’s what that looks like in chart form:

True, one reason that circ growth will lap ad losses is that the losses will be slowing after much steeper declines. Still, the best-case scenario for most old-line media businesses is that digital sales increase faster than physical sales drop, and that’s essentially what Venkateshwar says is happening here. A year after the Times introduced its pay wall, it now has 450,000 digital subscribers — a number that impresses lots of industry skeptics.

Earlier this spring, when the Times said it was making it harder to read the paper online without paying for it, by dropping its free article limit from 20 per month to 10 per month, I wondered if the Times had made the move out of necessity — because it needed to boost its digital sales — or optimism — because it was confident it could boost its sales with a taller pay wall.

But after some thought, and bouncing the idea off a few industry folks, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s both. The Times would sure like to accelerate Venkateshwar’s timeline, and that’s probably not going to happen by fixing its ad problem. Meanwhile, the paper seems relatively confident that raising the pay wall equals marketing the pay wall. And the nice thing about the system the paper has built is that if it doesn’t work, it can fiddle with the controls some more.

Assuming Yahoo gives its interim CEO real power — either by making him its actual CEO, or at least letting him behave as if he has the job — then he’ll finally have full control of a giant media company. That’s something he’s been working toward for a long time, despite his rep as a guy who enjoys buying companies more than running them.

Just like his predecessors, Levinsohn will have to untie Yahoo’s knotty Asian problem. He’ll also have to spend time repairing relationships with Facebook and figuring out what to do with a Microsoft search deal that hasn’t been a huge success.

But if Levinsohn gets to run Yahoo the way he wants to run Yahoo, he’ll focus on getting the most out of its media business, because that’s his strength.

Bear in mind that this is still a huge business — the portal attracts some 700 million visitors a month, which helped it generate nearly $1 billion in ad sales last quarter. But that business is listing and under attack from Google, Facebook, and a swarm of nimble start-ups pulling eyeballs and dollars away.

If you want to get a sense of what Levinsohn may try to do next, it’s good to review what he did last year, when he had control of the company’s U.S. operations — and what he tried to do but couldn’t get done.

• Ads: Yahoo used to have one of the Web’s best sales operations, but those days are long gone. Levisonsohn spent much of 2011 trying to fix that. Part of that involved restaffing his team, and part of it was a strategy that was supposed to cut out some of the ad tech middlemen and allow the company to increase its yield on the ads it sold. Those moves, which included a would-be alliance between Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, all went into a holding pattern when Scott Thompson took over in January. Levinsohn will try restarting that again now.
• M&A: Levinsohn has a reputation as a dealmaker because he’s made some pretty big deals. Most notably, he brought Myspace to News Corp. in 2005, then helped the company secure a $900 million ad deal with Google (News Corp. also owns this Web site). Last year, he tried to land another big fish, when he pushed to pursue Hulu. But Levinsohn couldn’t get buy-in from then-CEO Carol Bartz, and Hulu’s owners decided not to sell after all. I think Levinsohn would still be interested in the site under certain conditions, but he’d need more cash than he has on hand to do it. Selling off his Asian assets might make that possible. If he can’t land Hulu, I don’t see him chasing after Instagram-like companies with big price tags and no near-term revenue plans. I do see him making some plays on cheaper start-ups, as well as some technology plays, to shore up/replace the company’s very old infrastructure/platforms.

Capstone analyst Rory Maher thinks so. He’s been polling ad buyers and thinks they may collectively be spending 40 percent more on YouTube than they did a year ago.

He also thinks YouTube’s strategy of grouping its new channels into “genres” — like “women,” “pop culture,” etc. — and selling those as megapackages is attractive to advertisers, and that they’ve at least placed tentative commitments on all 18 packages YouTube is selling.

But those dollars aren’t going to come from TV, Maher thinks. Instead, advertisers will take money they would have spent on other Web ads and move them over to YouTube. That’s still a win for Google, but it’s not the win it really wants.

Last week’s event didn’t win everyone over. Several folks I’ve talked to — including people who are making stuff for YouTube’s channels — say they’re underwhelmed with the actual content they saw onstage at the Beacon Theater.

“It looked like Web video,” one Web video maker told me. That is, it didn’t look like the stuff the TV guys show off at their advertiser events.

Some of the stuff may get close to TV.

YouTube is brimming with pride over WIGS, a series of soapy dramas featuring actresses you’ve heard of, like Jennifer Beals and Julia Stiles (News Corp., which owns this site, had a hand in putting the series together). The teaser trailer they’ve put out looks like a reasonable facsimile of Lifetime, at least to my eyes. And Machinima is planning a series based on Halo, the hit Xbox game, and the few seconds of that they showed looked pretty slick.

It’s more likely that most of the Web video YouTube produces with its channels this year really will end up looking like Web video. But if that doesn’t bother the people who watch it — and there are some 800 million people watching this stuff every month — then it shouldn’t be a problem for the ad guys, either.

That is, more people are watching Web stuff on Microsoft’s machine than on the iPad, iPhone or any Android machine, anywhere. And when it comes to home viewing, competitors like Apple TV, Google TV and Roku are so far behind they’re not even competitors.

This data comes from Freewheel, an online video ad company, and it comes with caveats. We’ll get to those below. But first, take a look:

Now the asterisks: Freewheel is only measuring “professional content” that runs with ads, because that’s how it makes its living. So that means it’s counting stuff from companies like NBC, CBS, ESPN and Vevo, but not YouTube cat videos. It’s also not measuring Netflix usage. On the other hand, this isn’t a poll or sample, but data compiled by the company’s own ad servers.

So it’s possible there’s some variance here with the larger Web video world, but it seems reasonable to assume that this is at least directionally correct. At the very least, it gives credence to Microsoft’s claim that Xbox users are spending more time watching videos on the machines than playing games, and that its deals with conventional TV programmers may be bearing fruit.

And it shows you how much ground Google will need to make up as it gets ready to relaunch its Google TV. Ditto for Apple, if and when it ever gets serious about transforming Apple TV into something other than a “hobby.”

That pitch is also fueling a whole lot of start-ups, who want to piggyback on Facebook’s ascent by helping advertisers shovel money into the site.

Today’s example: Adaptly, which manages Facebook ad campaigns and also helps marketers buy ads on other social platforms, like Twitter and StumbleUpon.

The NYC-based company has raised a $10.5 million B round, led by Valhalla Partners; the company also brought in Time Warner Investments and Vivi Nevo as new investors. Adaptly had previously raised $2.7 million.

The company is run by freakishly young cofounders — Nikhil Sethi, 23, and Garrett Ullom, 22, both fresh out of Northwestern (Ullom didn’t stick around to graduate). Sethi (pictured above) says his company booked $10 million in gross revenue in 2011, and will “greatly exceed that” this year. (Update: That’s actually $10 million in gross bookings, not revenue, Sethi says. Thanks to Steven Kane for the nudge.)

Adaptly has around 50 employees, a bunch of whom have migrated there via Invite Media, the ad tech start-up Google bought in 2010. The two companies share a few other ties: Both have been backed by Philly’s First Round Capital, and Invite CEO Nat Turner has invested in Adaptly as well. Small world.

(An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Invite Media was a product of the Dreamit Ventures program.)

The earnings beat is nice for AOL. Not nice: Domestic display sales, a key metric, shrank 1 percent after climbing for several quarters. That’s going to be fresh meat for AOL critics like Starboard Value.

So what happened to domestic? “Domestic display advertising revenue declined primarily reflecting a decline in reserved impressions sold, partially offset by growth in reserved inventory pricing and Patch revenue,” AOL’s release says.

Later on in the release, we get a better sense of what may have happened: AOL’s audience is melting away. Traffic to AOL’s own properties is down 4 percent over the last year.

I imagine that Tim Armstrong will tell analysts that the decline isn’t wholly unexpected, because AOL’s dial-up unit, which still powers the whole operation, continues to shrink — that archaic business lost 14 percent of its subscribers in the last year.

On the other hand, this is a full year since AOL paid $315 million for the Huffington Post (and another $30+ million for TechCrunch, a few months before). I guess Armstrong could argue that things would be worse if he hadn’t bought the new sites, but that’s not very inspiring.

Update: A quick skim through the archives reminds me that shrinkage has been a recurring problem for AOL. The company also posted a 4 percent traffic drop in Q4 2011. And in Q3, traffic was flat. When I asked Armstrong about the issue then, he did indeed argue that the new sites were fighting off the decrease from dial-up users, and also argued that the company was still integrating Arianna and company (work in progress, apparently). He also predicted that traffic would tick up over time, and it has, just a bit — AOL is up to 108 million uniques versus 107 million six months ago. Key question: Does he expect more progress? Should shareholders?

AOL’s call starts at 8 am ET. We’ll see what Armstrong has to say then.

Update: AOL blames the Q1 drop on a number of things, including a specific but unnamed advertiser that stopped spending during the quarter. But Armstrong also tells analysts that his sales team’s pitch wasn’t resonating with advertisers. “A lot of it was because we have had a display strategy that was probably off-tune,” he says, adding “I was not happy with the domestic display.”

AOL says its display problems won’t be fixed this quarter, either, and predicts another drop. But it says domestic display will start moving up again in the second half of the year.

Meanwhile, AOL defends its much-maligned Patch unit, by noting that revenues are up and expenses are down at the local-news play this year. Armstrong tells investors that Patch will hit “run rate profitability” by the end of 2013. If they give him that much time.

So why did the number of pay-TV subscribers increase in just the last three months?

They didn’t grow much — a modest 422,000 subscribers, for a very modest 0.2 percent growth rate — but they still grew.

Those numbers come from Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett, a longtime skeptic that “cord-cutting” is a real and pervasive problem for the cable guys (at least for now). It’s not the first time he’s shown evidence of barely-there growth for cable TV — last quarter, for instance, he gathered similar numbers.

But his numbers do conflict with other reports that show evidence of cord-cutting. Earlier this month, for instance, Nielsen said that pay-TV subscribers had shrunk by 1.5 million in 2011.

The easiest way to reconcile Moffett’s numbers with other reports is to note that almost all of the analyst’s data comes from the publicly traded pay-TV providers themselves — like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon — in the reports they offer up to shareholders. Most of the other stuff you’re seeing comes from polls and surveys.

Here’s his data. You’ll need to click the image to enlarge it:

But what about all of you folks who tell me, over and over, that you’ve ditched cable for some kind of combo of Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, or even pirate streams? Surely I’ll hear from some of you again, just as soon as I publish this.

And I believe you folks, too. I can certainly imagine many scenarios where tech-savvy people — and even not-that-tech-savvy people — are able to satisfy their video urges without paying for a TV subscription. But my operating theory, for now, remains my vegan analogy: “They’re real, and they’re out there. They’re particularly notable in certain places like New York, the Bay Area and college towns. And they over-index at certain Web gathering places, like this one. But McDonald’s sales are still chugging along.”

Eventually they settle, and you, the pay-TV customer, ends up paying more.

And that’s what’s happening in the latest dustup between Dish Networks, the satellite TV service, and AMC Networks, the programmers now best known as the guys who bring you “Mad Men,” “The Walking Dead” and “Breaking Bad.”

The slight twist here: For argument’s sake, at least, Dish is saying that because AMC is selling digital versions of those shows to other outlets, its hit shows are worth less to Dish subscribers. “It’s actually devalued,” says Dish chairman Charlie Ergen.

The fact that networks are selling or giving away their stuff online has been a minor but growing issue in carriage fights for a while now. But this is the biggest stink that a cable/pay TV provider has made about it, at least in public.*

Dish first brought this up via a press statement last week, but Ergen went on about it at length today during the Dish earnings call.

It’s worth reading. I’ve cleaned up his comments just a bit for clarity (note that AMC Networks includes multiple channels, including AMC, IFC and Sundance):

We have very, very specific viewer measurement. Much more granular than somebody like Nielsen might have. So we’re able to watch our customer base and — we realize we skew a bit more rural — between [AMC Networks] programming, they have very, very low viewership, outside of a few obviously popular [shows] on AMC.

But those particular channels are also available to our customers on a variety of other sources, like iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and so on.

One of the things that programmers have done is that they’ve devalued their programming content by making it available in many multiple outlets. So, when someone asks for price increases …

We just look at it. Our customers are not really saying “We want to pay more money,” they’re saying, “We want more flexibility in our programming, and we don’t want to pay more.”

And when you look at that from a timing perspective, that’s just a contract that we can change. And we believe that the product is actually devalued. Not that there’s not some good programs, but that they’ve been devalued, because you can get it in multiple ways. And customers are asking for more flexibility, or have more flexibility to get the programming. So it’s not quite the same as something that was exclusive.

So we look at it and say, “This is a good opportunity to make a good business judgment call.” And obviously there’s a price where an [AMC Networks] product makes sense. We just don’t think that’s where we are today.

First things first: Obviously it makes the most sense to dump all of this into the “posturing” bucket, and treat it accordingly. The easy money here is to bet that, yet again, Dish and AMC will strike a deal, which Ergen, at the end of his remarks, explicitly says is on the table.

That said, a couple of points:

• Most of the big TV programmers seem to agree with Ergen’s point when it comes to free repeats of recent shows. Which is why they have been taking stuff that they’ve been giving away via outlets like Hulu, and either pulling them off the Web entirely, or requiring that customers “authenticate” — prove that they’re paying for cable or satellite TV —  in order to see them without delay. Note that Dish was the first pay-TV service to participate in the Fox authentication plan last summer. (Fox is owned by News Corp., as is this Web site.)
• TV programmers don’t seem to think that iTunes’ and Amazon’s a la carte sales of shows that aired the night before are devaluing their product. Because they’re still selling them, and by all accounts there doesn’t seem to be a ton of volume for those episodes. If there was, advertisers would squawk long before pay-TV providers would.
• The really touchy subject here is what happens to prior-season episodes of AMC hits like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” on Netflix. Netflix has been arguing that these episodes are big draws for its customers, and that this is good for networks like AMC, because people discover the old shows on Netflix and then watch the new ones as they air. There is some evidence for this, too.
• But there is also evidence that Netflix repeats hurt some cable programming — like kids’ shows — too. And that leads to speculation that Viacom and Disney will pull back their shows from the service or raise prices when their contracts expire — even though Netflix is already paying big dollars for them. Netflix will have its hands on “Mad Men” and other AMC shows for at least a couple of years more. But it will be interesting to see what Dish’s complaint means for the renegotiations.

*There is also a wrinkle involving a lawsuit between Dish and a former AMC subsidiary, but that’s par for the course, too. All of these guys sue all of these guys, all the time. No recession, ever, for TV attorneys.

The search giant is set to invest in Machinima, one of the most popular networks on YouTube, via a funding round that should close within a month. Machinima focuses almost exclusively on YouTube videos for and about videogame players, and generates more than a billion views a month.

People familiar with the round tell me it should end up raising more than $30 million, and will value the company at around $190 million, post-funding. No comment from Google or Machinima.

Google will be one of several investors backing Machinima in this round. And even if it put in the entire amount itself, it wouldn’t be material for a company that did $8.1 billion last quarter.

But the move has significant symbolism, because it’s the first time Google has openly backed a content company by taking an equity stake. YouTube is spending more than $100 million on its much-publicized channel program, but it is writing those checks as loans to content makers, and it recoups the money via ad sales.

The deal may ruffle some feathers among other video makers, some of whom already complain that YouTube favors Machinima and a handful of prominent content partners. And people familiar with the funding round tell me that at one point Google considered routing the investment through its Google Ventures arm to try to allay those concerns.

The counter to that argument: Why shouldn’t Google back content producers who make stuff for its properties? After all, YouTube is trying to become more like TV. And most of the big TV networks own their own studios outright.

The Washington Post reported this morning that its online ad revenue dropped 7 percent in the first three months of 2012. That follows a New York Times earnings release which saw that publisher’s Web ad business drop 2 percent.

(We should get some color on the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, when parent company News Corp. reports its earnings next week; News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

The Times said that digital sales were “under pressure” in the first quarter of the year, while the Post didn’t bother to add any color to its results. But it did note that online display ads were down 11 percent, while classifieds were down 1 percent.

Unlike the Times, the Post is essentially a regional newspaper, so it is harder to argue that its travails reflect a larger trend. And it’s also worth noting that the Post faces fierce competition for its core political coverage from Politico, an online/offline competitor that basically sprouted overnight.

But for the record: The rest of the Web publishing business — including not only Google but laggards like Yahoo — has been posting Q1 revenue increases.  [An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that AOL's ad revenues were up for Q1; the company won't post its numbers until next week.]

Here’s a proof point: Discovery Communications, parent of the Discovery Channel, has purchased Revision3, a Web video start-up that makes and distributes its own shows, like “Tekzilla” and “Epic Meal Time.”

Discovery isn’t disclosing a purchase price, but multiple sources familiar with the transaction tell me the cable guys will pay around $30 million for the start-up. The company ended up raising about $10 million during its six-year lifespan, with the last chunk coming from a group of investors that included Mark Cuban.

All of Revision3’s 50 employees are supposed to stay on, and there’s a chance that they could end up pulling down sizeable earnouts. But they probably won’t, because that’s the nature of earnouts.

TechCrunch reported the deal talks earlier this week.

This deal isn’t an “acqhire,” as Discovery intends to keep Revision3 operating out of its San Francisco headquarters. The idea is that Revision3 will continue to make its own Web shows, which generate some 100 million streams a month, and that Discovery will eventually figure out ways to sync up some of its own stuff into the mix.

“We want them to continue doing what they’re doing, and to continue developing native digital talent,” says Discovery’s digital boss JB Perrette. To date, Discovery hasn’t done a lot with Web video, and has traditionally kept most of its cable programming off the Internet. That has changed a bit recently, via library deals with Amazon and Netflix, and may ramp up a bit more in the future.

The deal comes as big Web players are trying to convince advertisers that their video stuff is just as good as TV — see Google’s big show in New York last night.

But Discovery thinks there’s still a distinction between TV and the Web — which is why it wanted to buy Revision3 in the first place.

“We produce content on a $500,000 to $750,000-an-hour scale,” Perrette says. “Producing something at a tenth of that cost means it has to be very different.”

Meanwhile, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback, who used to write blog posts with titles like “Cable TV Is Screwd,” now says there’s life in the cable business, after all. “One’s not going to destroy the other,” he says. “I don’t think any new media destroys the other. I think it just creates its own path.”

This is the strategy that all of the big Web portals are suddenly employing. And they’re making a particularly big deal about it right now, because they’re all putting on fancy showcases for advertisers, modeled on the “upfront” presentations the TV guys put on every year.

YouTube’s was last night, at New York’s Beacon Theatre, and it was by far the most extravagant shindig of the bunch. (This included the post-event dinners, where YouTubers schmoozed advertisers at many of the city’s nicest restaurants: Ma Peche, Del Posto, A Voce, etc.)

If you didn’t go last night (you really did need a ticket), here’s the finale, via an unofficial shakycam grab. If you can’t pick this up from the clip, I can attest that the crowd really did get a huge kick out of this. Perhaps the YouTube folks will put up a fancier version later on:

And here’s a list of famous, semi-famous, or kinda-maybe-famous people that joined Jay-Z onstage:

Neon Trees
Pharrell Williams
Miri Ben-Ari
Chris Hardwick
Jon Avnet and Rodrigo Garcia
Julia Stiles
Sarah Jones
Jennifer Beals
Caitlin Gerard
Virginia Madsen
Brian Robbins
Flo Rida

(Image courtesy of Life and Times)

The company is pulling back the covers (a bit) on its plans to produce kids’ shows and sitcoms via its “Amazon Studios” unit, which has already been dipping a toe into the movie business. Word of the new push leaked out earlier this year, via hiring notices — such a useful way to track a secretive company! — and now Amazon is ’fessing up.

A bit. Amazon Studios head Roy Price won’t discuss his budget, or the number of shows he intends to make, or a timeline for getting them on the Web. But he is willing to sketch out a couple of notions:

• Like the movie effort, Amazon is soliciting scripts for new productions via the Web, and will pay out modest fees — $10,000 for an option, $55,000 if a show gets produced, plus possible royalties — for stuff it likes.
• The big difference between his TV effort and his movie effort is that Amazon intends (with some exceptions) to actually make the shows, and distribute them via its own “Amazon Instant Video” offering. (For the movie effort, Amazon is feeding scripts it likes to Warner Bros., which will decide what to do with them.)
• Price says the shows he does make should look and feel like “real” TV shows, with commensurate production budgets.

Lots of wiggle room in all of this. So the big news is that Amazon is formally declaring that it’s in the original video business — just like Google, Hulu, Netflix, Yahoo and lots of other tech guys.

Not surprisingly, Price doesn’t want to talk about Amazon’s place in that newly formed constellation. But he does point out that this isn’t the first time the company has started making its own media. Amazon has already launched its own book-publishing business, and has started poaching “real” authors for that effort, and that has traditional book publishers terrified.

Hard to see Hollywood freaking out about this right now — particularly when they’re making a ton of money selling Amazon their old shows. But if this ever takes off, that could change.

And if you combine the two? You get Vungle, a barely hatched start-up that just raised a $2 million seed round.

Vungle’s pitch is straightforward: They help app developers make video promo reels for their stuff, and turn them into “in-app” ads (you can see a sample below). There are a whole lot of ways to buy in-app advertising for other apps already — it’s a big chunk of the mobile ad business right now — but the Vungle guys argue that they make it easy. And that unlike iAd, AdMob, Millenial, etc., it’s all they do.

Fair enough. No way to really tell now, as the company is only in “alpha,” with a handful of paying customers that include Path, the buzzy next-gen social network, and Pocket Games, a game developer. A more open beta comes this summer.

At least as interesting as the pitch is the backstory, which has co-founders Zain Jeffer, 24, and Jack Smith, 23, leaving London on a whim to join the AngelPad start-up factory last fall, then finding themselves in a whirlwind round of financing. For instance, they pitched Crosslink’s David Silverman at his home on a weekend, and got a commitment a day later.

Multimillion dollar seed rounds would have been unheard of a couple years ago. Now they’re increasingly commonplace (here’s one for $4.2 million), at least for a certain class of incubator-blessed start-ups. And they’re part of the reason that you’re hearing lots of bubble talk right now.

For the record, the Vungle guys say they had no intention of raising so much out of the gate. But “as soon as you tell people you don’t want money, that’s when they want to give you money,” Smith says. Among those chipping in: Google Ventures, AOL Ventures, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, Charles Hudson, Maynard Webb, Scott McNealy and Tim Draper.

Revenues dropped 3 percent for the first three months of the year, while operating income shrank by 38 percent.

Corporate parent Time Warner blamed the decline on both slowing ad sales (down 5 percent) and newsstand sales (circulation revenue was down 2 percent).

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes occasionally calls out Time Inc.’s efforts to get its titles onto the iPad and other tablets, and the unit has some digital success stories on the Web. But no one expects Time Inc. to turn into a high-growth business again.

Still, over the last few years it has managed to at least show improvements in its operating profits, as a result of layoffs and corporate restructuring.

Laura Lang, the unit’s newly appointed CEO, is Time Inc.’s third boss in two years. She has her work cut out for her.