Another day, another article about how social-networking advertising has a steep uphill ride to get to any kind of decent pinnacle of profitability.

This time, it’s the New York Times’s Digital Domain columnist Randall Stross weighing in yesterday on the experiments going on between Facebook and the world’s largest advertiser, Procter & Gamble (PG).

Unfortunately, Stross did not appear to actually talk much to either party about the specific results, except to make his own nonscientific determination of two seemingly lackluster advertising efforts around P&G’s Tide and Crest brands on Facebook.

Thus, to my mind, the article represents the high-water mark of the Facebook-Is-Dead theme. This is characterized by the theme of the hot social-networking site running out of money and doing down rounds from its once-touted $15 billion valuation (a valuation that was fiction then and only more so in this weak economic environment).

That plot was, of course, preceded by the Facebook-Is-Immortal story, in which the start-up could do no wrong.

BoomTown did not buy the latter, as readers of this column will recall. But I certainly don’t accept the former either.

Instead, hopefully, we can now reset all our expectations and keep it simple: Facebook has impressive growth and terrific products, which everyone should admire.

Now, it and other sites like it have to come up with innovative ways to monetize their services.

And that is not impossible, as the article in the Times–which would surely trade Facebook’s challenges for its own in the ad market, I would guess–insinuates.

How does it arrive at this conclusion?

By referencing a sizzling quote last month by Ted McConnell, manager of interactive marketing and innovation at P&G, of course, who said at a conference: “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads in Facebook” and also, “I don’t want to be best friends with a brand…It’s just stuff.”

Along with this less-than-smoking gun, the article also lists all the alleged problems of advertising in a social-networking environment, most of which are very old news for anyone paying even the slightest attention over the last year.

To wit: People on social networks like to hang with friends rather than brands; ads on member homepages are cheap, but no one looks at them anyway; to get people to pay attention, you need to fork over too much or do dumb prize contests; consumers are not interested in being brand ambassadors; and, of course, advertisers don’t like putting their brands next to possibly nutty user-generated content.

While a P&G spokesperson later told the Times it was committed to its “strong” Facebook relationship, Stross ended with this zinger: “When Facebook convinces advertisers to stage Super Bowl-sized entertainment every day, its future will be assured.”

Thanks for the heads-up, except the premise could not be further from what it will likely take for the Facebooks of the world to succeed.

Rather than think on these kinds of mass terms, the ad industry is going to have to get used to a much different paradigm if it wants to reach young consumers. It is a Twittery, SMS-rich, Super-Poking world, in which the message will have to be drastically changed to work.

And it is incumbent on Facebook and the ad industry to come up with new kinds of ad formats–yet uninvented–and new means of engagement.

Now, Facebook–which never met a buzzword it did not trot out too early–is using this “engagement” term to try to excite advertisers, which it should not do before such a thing actually works.

Instead, it has to slowly and quietly make inroads on a variety of fronts, much as Google (GOOG) did way back when it was not profitable, and then tout the results.

Until Facebook does that, though, expect more of the same it-won’t-work mentality across the landscape.

That is, until it does work, of course.

With more critics piling on to the just-say-no-to-Yahoogle bandwagon–questioning the controversial ad deal for Yahoo to outsource some of its search ads to Google–sources said some top Google execs are now hightailing it to Washington, D.C., to smooth over any regulatory feathers the company might have ruffled with its aggressive, damn-the-torpedoes approach to pushing the deal forward.

The partnership is set to start up around Oct. 13 and promises to give the much-suffering Yahoo (YHOO) a huge boost in revenues.

Google (GOOG), of course, benefits by blocking Microsoft (MSFT), which has caused the software giant to lobby against the deal like a lipstick-wearing pitbull.

Google and Microsoft have been locked in a variety of tech battles on many fronts of late, but the Yahoo front has been a particularly rough one.

Critics like Microsoft have a lot of ammo here though, especially because Yahoo and Google together will claim over 80 percent of the search market.

That has caused a big outcry to prevent the No. 1 and No. 2 players from partnering.

The latest objection, among a passel of them, came earlier this week from the World Federation of Advertisers, which has asked the European Commission to stop the partnership, even though the deal, as currently conceived, impacts only U.S. Web sites.

So to assuage the tumult, Google is glad-handing regulators, even as Yahoo announced a new group for advertisers called the Digital Advisory Council.

“Opening up Yahoo! is a key part of our strategy, and we want to help advertisers understand how they can benefit from this approach,” said Yahoo U.S. EVP Hilary Schneider. “At the same time, there has been confusion and misinformation surrounding Yahoo!’s agreement with Google, which represents another key milestone in opening up our network. As questions emerge about how Yahoo! will implement this agreement, the Advisory Council will provide a forum for us to engage in a dialogue with key customers on those issues.”

Well, phew! A council! That’s sure to bring online ad harmony across the planet!

Actually, it all feels like that model United Nations thing I grudgingly did in high school, and almost as useful.

And the pair also got a boost from New York Times Digital Domain columnist Randall Stross, who penned a piece Sunday called “Why the Google-Yahoo Ad Deal Is Nothing to Fear.”

Nothing? Really? Not even a little bit?

BoomTown has got to say, we’re still a smidgen nervous. OK, tons and tons. (And, it turns out TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington agrees with me, so you know it is serious!)

Still, in the interest of fairness, let’s examine Stross’s main argument, which is essentially that Google’s and Yahoo’s more than 80 percent market share does not matter.

“Google controls about 70 percent of the search advertising market. Doesn’t that give it a monopolist’s ability to set prices as high as it wishes?

“It does not. Google does not set the prices. Its advertisers do, bidding against one another for the amount they will pay when a user clicks on one of their ads. They do the same for ads on Yahoo and Microsoft search sites, too.”

Noting Microsoft’s efforts to portray Google as a “price-controlling monster,” Stross then tried to make a case that worries about higher prices are currently just speculation and not based in practice.

“Even though this is a business based on auction pricing, the specter of price fixing has been raised by demagogues. Shout ‘monopoly’ loud enough and point to ’90 percent share’ of something–it doesn’t really matter what–and federal and state regulators will decide this is a matter meriting their close attention.

“One company has done more than any other to publicly disparage the Yahoo-Google deal: Microsoft, the same company that did not succeed in acquiring Yahoo earlier this year. Hell hath no fury like a suitor scorned.”

Oh dear, the loser-boyfriend argument, which is a canard.

Sure, Microsoft is up to all sorts of tricks and aggressive lobbying about the deal–just as Google surely would be if the tables were turned and Microsoft had won the heart of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and consummated a merger marriage.

And Google and Yahoo are correct that the auction model means advertisers set prices for ads.

But what Stross is leaving out is the key problem of what happens later, when perhaps Yahoo’s share of the search market declines even further–as is the inexorable trend–and Yahoo becomes yet another vassal of Google’s largess.

That’s now true for AOL, Ask, MySpace and many others. And it is in no one’s interest–especially publishers–to have just one place to turn, which is what they will have, since Google will increasingly yield the best results.

Last week, for example, I was meeting with a big advertiser on both Google and Yahoo, who noted that he liked to have two strong choices.

“In the end, as Yahoo’s results weaken, it will probably only make sense to use Google,” he said. “And that opens up a whole can of worms.”

Indeed. Which is why–at the very least–regulators should force Google and Yahoo to make some commitments about their deal.

The kind of trust-but-verify-later requirements that anticipate possible problems was well argued in the form of a white paper yesterday from a nonprofit think tank called the American Antitrust Institute.

The report was relatively even-handed, noting, “the transaction should be viewed as presumptively anticompetitive, although it may also contain possible pro-competitive benefits.”

So, in the interests of consumer and advertisers and publishers, it is incumbent on the government to get tweaks to the Yahoogle deal that minimize the former and maximize the latter.

Without such promises, who knows what tomorrow brings in a world in which one search engine survives?

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.