Let’s see if the paper’s executives can turn that around during their earnings call. We’ll also be looking for any updates the Times can provide on its pay wall plans, and, of course, its role in the launch of the Apple iPad.

UPDATE: As I noted below, though the New York Times (NYT) was a featured partner at the launch of Apple’s (AAPL) iPad, even sending a small team to Cupertino to create an app a few weeks before the event, there was zero discussion about iPads today.

CEO Janet Robinson made a generalized comment about the growth of the Times’s mobile distribution, but that was it. And not a single analyst showed any interest in this stuff–a good reminder that neither the Times nor Wall Street expects the iPad to be material to the company’s business for quite some time.

Liveblog

On the call: CEO Janet Robinson, CFO Jim Follo, Times Media Group boss Scott Heekin-Canedy, and Digital boss Martin Nisenholtz

In a preamble, CEO Robinson highlights cost-cutting, balance sheet repair, and asset sales (radio station, but not the Boston Globe; the company is still looking at selling its stake in the Boston Red Sox–the process is “complicated” and is “taking longer than anticipated”).

Robinson recaps the pay wall plan, metered approach, etc. Nothing new here so far.

The paper is waiting until 2011 to deploy the pay wall, she explains, because it wants to make “subscribing as smooth and easy as possible….It will take some time to build, deploy and test the best systems.”

Robinson offers a few revenue details, primarily a recap of the earnings release.

Ads by category: National ads down 12 percent, retail down 23 percent, classifieds down 27 percent.

News media online grew four percent, primarily from display advertising (the rest of online growth comes from About.com).

Print ad category decreases came from Hollywood, among others. Ad category increases: Print auto, health care, packaged goods.

Circulation revenue is up because of newsstand, price increases. The Times is benefiting from declines at other papers, because as local papers cut back, it is offering more info than ever. Robinson notes expansion by the paper into local news in the Chicago and San Francisco markets, adding that there are plans on going local in “several” other key markets

Time to brag about new mobile products and applications. The paper counted 75 million page views from mobile and apps in December, and the iPhone app has been downloaded three million times since launch.

Back to digital: Display ads are up, classifieds down; they improved “significantly” as Q4 progressed.

About.com is still the Times’s digital cash machine: Revenue is up 22 percent, and operating profit grew from $10 million to $18 million.

Overall, Internet businesses are up 10 percent and accounted for 15 percent of revenue for the quarter. Online advertising revenue accounted for 23 percent of ad revenue of the quarter.

“Limited” visibility for 2010, which is what’s upsetting The Street, supposedly. But the paper is still “realigning” its cost base.

CFO Jim Follo’s comments may not interest all readers except for this part: The Times is continuing to reduce headcount, he notes, which dropped by 18 percent in 2009. The company is also looking at the benefit structure for both employees and retirees. It froze that awesome supplemental retirement plan that pays certain retirees a very lucrative pension.

We’ve been benefiting from a drop in newsprint prices last couple years, Follo notes, though suppliers are trying to raise prices again, but there’s a supply glut, so we think they’ll have a tough time doing that.

No big capital spending projects are planned. [Presumably, the pay wall is not that expensive to build.]

[Aside: Interesting that NYT.com GM Denise Warren, who's normally on these calls, isn't on today's.]

Questions and Answers

Question: More color on advertising, please.

Scott Heekin-Canedy: We have some optimism, but advertisers are “guarded,” and ads are still bought–or retracted–at the last minute, as they were last year.

Tech, media, health care, and auto ad categories all look promising. The mix is “definitely different” from last year “when it seemed like every single category was down.” Now, many categories are showing “flat to significant growth.”

Question: Are you still optimistic that you can reach a deal on the Red Sox?

Robinson: “Yes we are.” Lots of due diligence, lots of different properties (stake in team, stadium, network, etc.).

Q: What are incremental costs of setting up a pay wall?

Robinson: “We feel this is an elegant solution,” but we want to wait the year and make sure we’re well prepared, etc. Again, integrating home delivery and digital is crucial.

Nisenholtz: Regarding cost, there will be a “modest operating cost” to deploy the tech. We’re hiring a “handful” of people to do that and deploying “modest” capital, but it’s not material.

[Apology: I missed a question on ad categories, though it seems to reprise the earlier question.]

Q: Can you give us a sense of additional cost-savings you can extract this year?

Follo: Nope.

Q: Will your headcount go down again in 2010?

Follo: Yes.

[Missed another question here.]

Next a question about the tax rate, which I can’t imagine anyone reading this cares about.

Q: Can you tell us more about January ad trends, i.e., how much is national vs. local?

Robinson: We won’t break that out (anymore).

Q: Was it materially better than Q4?

Robinson: She repeats her earlier comments from the release. “Very good performance” on the digital side of business. December was particularly good, but we’re not going to be more specific about January.

Heekin-Canedy: That said, we don’t think January is much of an indicator about the rest of the year, anyway. Different beast, not much connection between December [when people were dumping leftover dollars].

[There's a giant disconnect between analysts and the chattering classes here. If the latter ran the call, this would be about nothing but iPad, iPad, iPad. But we're 48 minutes in, and zilch so far. Which is a good reminder: No matter what launches with the tablet this year, this stuff isn't going to have a big impact on Big Media for quite some time.]

Q: Where is growth coming from at About.com?

Robinson: Both consumer packaged goods and display ads. We’ve upgraded the sales channel to go after display and that’s helped a lot.

Nisenholtz: Strong categories include CPC, travel, education and financial services. There’s also retail strength.

Q: Are CPGs new to About.com?

Nisenholtz: Yeah. Well, not exactly. It’s a big site, lots of reach. But we’ve updgraded the sales team and the increase there is part of the payoff. We reach a lot of moms. The Web site skews female.

Q: You may end up paying $60 million to $80 million back into the pension plan. When could that come? Q4?

Follo: Could be sooner than that. We’re in a good position regarding liquidity.

[The final question is about joint ventures that you don't care about.]

And that’s it for the call.

But one observer says it’s already here: Ad optimization firm PubMatic reports that prices for ad network inventory it sees have increased 35 percent since the beginning of the year.

The firm’s data make for a hopeful chart (click to enlarge):

But these numbers could be less meaningful than they look. The most important thing to keep in mind here is that Pubmatic is only tracking prices for ad-network inventory. And if low-priced ad networks are taking market share from display ads, as is likely the case, then these numbers won’t do much good for  publishers–perhaps like the very one producing this site–who specialize in big, premium ad buys.

And the other obvious point to make here is that Pubmatic’s data are only about pricing, not volume, so they don’t really tell us whether advertisers are spending more, or less, than they used to.

But for what it’s worth, I made my own informal channel-check with two big publishers who do specialize in branded ads yesterday, and they told me things had picked up recently, as well: They differed on the degree of enthusiasm for the remainder of the year, but both cited demand from entertainment advertisers, as well as for advertisers of consumer packaged goods.

So maybe Pubmatic’s numbers are at least directionally accurate. That’d be nice, right?

One day I’ll get to stop writing this, because Twitter is slowly starting to sketch out some revenue plans.

But for now, it still holds true: Almost all of the money Twitter is generating is being generated by companies other than Twitter. They’re members of the growing ecosystem of companies that base their business on the microblogging service, but don’t pay Twitter a dime.

Here’s another one: Pontiflex, a lead-generation start-up that hoovers up names and other info from users who visit its network of publishers and then sells the data to marketers. The Brooklyn-based company is rolling out a Twitter product that lets marketers compile a list of interested Twitter users.

Sound simple? It is. All Pontiflex is doing is adding a Twitter “handle” field to its lead-generation forms (see example at right). Armed with these data, a marketer can follow Twitterers who say they’re interested in their products, and…not much else.

Since the users aren’t actually signing up to “follow” any of the marketers, said marketers can’t send them direct messages. The marketers could try to “at reply” their leads–the equivalent of shouting out the name of someone you think might be at a loud cocktail party but can’t actually see. But that’s about it.

So what’s that information worth? Depends, says Pontiflex CEO Zephrin Lasker. Probably more than an email address, but less than a phone number. He says pricing will depend on clients, volume, etc., but he figures he’ll be able to sell each Twitter handle to his consumer packaged goods clients for a couple bucks a pop. Call it anywhere from 50 cents to $5 per name.

Per usual, Twitter won’t see a penny of that.

Like most other Twitter ecosystem ideas, this one only works if Twitter really crosses over from novelty to mainstream and stays there. And the jury’s still out on that.

But in the meantime, marketers want in on the new hotness, and Lasker is happy to oblige.

“This is one of those things that people don’t know how to participate in, but they want to be there,” he says. “So, that’s where we can help.”

Also, just because we’re talking about leads, and I use any excuse I can get, here’s Alec Baldwin’s awesome “Always Be Closing” speech from “Glengarry Glen Ross.” (Warning! Contains salty sales language.)

Last week, I noted that Internet ad spending had dropped five percent in the first three months of the year, and wondered when Web ads might rebound.

And now, here’s a data point for optimists in the “soon, real soon” camp: Procter & Gamble (PG), the world’s biggest marketer, is pouring more into Web ads than ever. Last quarter, it increased its spending on Internet display ads by nearly 150 percent.

Those numbers, from ad tracking service TNS, via Ad Age, are similar to outlays from rival Johnson & Johnson (JNJ). Both companies are now spending about four percent of their ad bugets on online display–the boring banner ads on Yahoo (YHOO) and Time Warner online unit AOL (TWX) that everyone loves to complain about.

The numbers don’t include other Web categories like video and search. But as much as some of us (ok, me) like to chatter about video sites like YouTube and Hulu, Web video is still a tiny ad market. And  consumer packaged goods companies like P&G and J&J,  who bring you everything from toothpaste to diapers, have traditionally had less use for Google (GOOG) than other marketers.

These still aren’t huge numbers in the grand scheme of things: For P&G, that amounts to about $26.9 million in the first three months of the year; for J&J, $15.5 million.

But if this keeps up, it will be a big deal. Internet boosters have been waiting a very long time for the consumer packaged goods guys, who are responsible for a huge swath of offline advertising spending, to move onto the Web. Astonishing that it’s taken until 2009 to get them there, but you’re not going to hear many complaints right now.

Except that it’s not. At the end of last year, AOL was averaging 109 million unique visitors a month. So who are these people?

Turns out there’s a good chance they look like your mother–if your mom is somewhere between the ages of 45 and 64, and uses the site to get a little “me time.”

That’s according to Digitas, the ad agency working on behalf of the portal’s core AOL.com property. And now AOL wants that audience to become just a touch more youthful, via an ad campaign slated to launch this spring.

Here’s how AOL sees AOL.com, according to a document Digitas circulated to Web publishers last month:

AOL.com offers an escape from the daily grind with its window into news, entertainment, lifestyle, finance/money, social networking and helpful tools to manage a busy lifestyle. Users get all the ‘snacks’ they need by taking a break for some ‘me time’ at AOL.com.”

And here’s the site’s sense of its users–and who it would like its users to actually be following the online ad campaign, scheduled to run from April through July:

AOL traditionally appeals to a core 45-64 year-old female audience. With this campaign we aim to skew a shade younger.

PRIMARY TARGET–We will primarily target a slightly younger Gen X/Baby Boomer female. She may be a busy household manager looking for ways to economize. Beyond task based internet use, she often turns to the online world as a means to relieve stress and escape her day by indulging in soft news, relevant tips, email, shopping. etc.  We have coined these women ‘i-Browsers.’”

Specifically, AOL/Digitas says, it’s going after women ages 30-44 who don’t currently come to the site. It also wouldn’t mind targeting women ages 45-54, and adults of both genders between 30 and 54.

And just to be clear–neither AOL’s existing demo nor its desire to shift that demo a bit younger is a bad thing.

In fact it’s a great thing, at least right now: Advertisers aren’t spending much money trying to sell cars or financial products these days, but they’re still trying to move food, clothing, cleaning products and other stuff that falls under the “consumer packaged goods” rubric. Stuff that women (still) buy for their families. So no need for AOL to  be bashful about reaching that audience.

[Image credit: freeparking]