For Apple (AAPL), adding a second carrier in the States–particularly Verizon–serves a twofold purpose. First, it significantly expands the iPhone’s addressable market. Verizon (VZ) has a post-paid subscriber base upward of 83 million. And according to analysts, it will likely generate 12 million new unit sales for Apple next year. That would translate to more than $7 billion in incremental revenue and more than $3 in incremental earnings per share. Second, it blunts the competitive threat from Android. As Bernstein Research analyst Pierre Ferragu recently wrote, “[The iPhone’s] distribution vacuum, coupled with weak competitive offerings from other smartphone manufacturers, has made Android a strong alternative platform. The key to arresting Android’s momentum then will be for Apple to broaden distribution.”

Where better to broaden distribution than at one of Android’s strongest carrier proponents? And how better to set the stage for it than by putting the iPad into that carrier’s hands before the arrival of a competing Android tablet?

Before you snicker, bear in mind that Carol Bartz’s “B-” aside, people are still buying a lot of ads on Yahoo (YHOO), at least when it comes to display ads, where the Internet giant dominates. JP Morgan (JPM) puts the company’s share of the U.S. market for display ads at 17 percent, well ahead of No. 2 Microsoft (MSFT) at 11 percent and AOL (AOL) at seven percent.

Here’s a highlight reel of some of the more interesting inventory the company has sold in the last year. From the outside, at least, a lot of this stuff seems fairly similar to other big attention-getters that marketers are running on other Web sites. Apple’s (AAPL) inventive ads, for instance, are all over the Internet.

And lots of publishers are pushing oversize ads (and I bet that Web surfers will soon develop the ability to ignore those, just as they do with conventional banner ads).

Note that not everything here is a holy-cow-wouldya-lookit-that presentation, though. One of the highlights, for instance, is simply the addition of video to a search result for Charles Schwab (SCHW).

In any case, the clip works as a pretty good survey of Web advertising, and it’s reasonably short. Though if you’re not a huge fan of hairband guitar solos, you may want to turn the volume down.

Or, they fell to 1.2 million, a decline of 12.4 percent.

All depends on whom you believe, Gartner or IDC. According to Gartner, Apple has an 8.7 percent share of the U.S. market. According to IDC, that share is 7.6 percent. In a quarter that saw overall PC shipments in the U.S. decline 1.2 percent or three percent, that’s either pretty damn good or troubling, again depending on whom you believe.

Good thing both firms describe these estimates as “preliminary,” right?

Anyway, according to Gartner’s preliminary data, Apple (AAPL) maintained its position as the nation’s fourth-largest computer maker in the second quarter, ranking between Acer and Toshiba. According to IDC, it dropped to fifth, one spot above the dreaded “All Other Vendors” segment.

So what are we to make of this? A disparity of more than 200,000 units between the the Q2 domestic Mac shipment estimates of two top market research outfits? Is it a 2.5 percent year-over-year increase. Or a 12.4 percent year-over-year decrease?

I have no idea. And clearly, Gartner (IT) and IDC (IDC) don’t either. Best to just wait until next Tuesday when Apple announces definitive sales figures during its third-quarter earnings.

“It was clear that internationally, just as in the US, MySpace’s staffing had become too big and cumbersome to be sustainable in current market conditions,” said MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta. “Today’s proposed changes are designed to transform and refine our international growth strategy.” Operations in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden and Spain are “under review,” he added, and face possible closure.

The cuts follow a 30 percent reduction in headcount in the states last week and the hastening erosion of MySpace’s position in the social-networking market. MySpace lost the title of world’s most popular social network to rival Facebook last year and was overtaken by it in the U.S. last month as well.

“It was clear that internationally, just as in the US, MySpace’s staffing had become too big and cumbersome to be sustainable in current market conditions,” said MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta. “Today’s proposed changes are designed to transform and refine our international growth strategy.” Operations in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden and Spain are “under review,” he added, and face possible closure.

The cuts follow a 30 percent reduction in headcount in the states last week and the hastening erosion of MySpace’s position in the social-networking market. MySpace lost the title of world’s most popular social network to rival Facebook last year and was overtaken by it in the U.S. last month as well.

“Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company,” CEO Owen Van Natta said in a statement. “I understand that these changes are painful for many. They are also necessary for the long-term health and culture of MySpace. Our intent is to return to an environment of innovation that is centered on our user and our product.”

“MySpace grew too big considering the realities of today’s marketplace,” said Jon Miller, News Corporation’s (NWS) CEO of Digital Media. “I believe this restructuring will help MySpace operate much more effectively both structurally and financially moving forward.”

The news follows a report by market research outfit comScore (SCOR), indicating that Facebook has surpassed MySpace in the U.S. market as the top social-networking site.

Below, CEO Owen Van Natta’s all-hands memo breaking the ugly news.

Everyone,

Today we are making a number of changes to MySpace’s domestic organizational structure. For the long-term health of the company we are making some very tough, but unfortunately very necessary decisions.

We are reducing our workforce from 1,420 employees to 1,000 – all divisions within the company are affected by this restructure.

These decisions are difficult for everyone, but especially for our friends and colleagues who contributed to MySpace’s success and are directly affected by the changes. Through no fault of theirs our company’s size became unsustainable. The future success of MySpace is dependent upon us operating as a nimble and entrepreneurial company with the adaptive mentality of a start-up.

I believe this is the first difficult step toward a major turnaround – a step that will not only shore us up in the short term, but position us for long term success. We need to become a more innovative company. Becoming more innovative is an ongoing responsibility for all of us, not a one-time effort. We are developing a process that will empower anyone in the company to contribute ideas and enable us to integrate your thoughts into our plans for the future. We will follow-up with details on this process in the coming weeks.

This week we will communicate the foundation for our company strategy. In the days ahead, I will visit a number of U.S. offices, starting tomorrow at HQ, MySpace Music, and El Segundo. On Thursday I look forward to seeing everyone in Seattle and San Francisco, and on Friday, I’ll be spending time with the team based in New York.

I’m honored to be working with you on the next phase of MySpace and I’m grateful for your patience during this difficult process.

Thank you,
Owen

“Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company,” CEO Owen Van Natta said in a statement. “I understand that these changes are painful for many. They are also necessary for the long-term health and culture of MySpace. Our intent is to return to an environment of innovation that is centered on our user and our product.”

“MySpace grew too big considering the realities of today’s marketplace,” said Jon Miller, News Corporation’s (NWS) CEO of Digital Media. “I believe this restructuring will help MySpace operate much more effectively both structurally and financially moving forward.”

The news follows a report by market research outfit comScore (SCOR), indicating that Facebook has surpassed MySpace in the U.S. market as the top social-networking site.

Below, CEO Owen Van Natta’s all-hands memo breaking the ugly news.

Everyone,

Today we are making a number of changes to MySpace’s domestic organizational structure. For the long-term health of the company we are making some very tough, but unfortunately very necessary decisions.

We are reducing our workforce from 1,420 employees to 1,000 – all divisions within the company are affected by this restructure.

These decisions are difficult for everyone, but especially for our friends and colleagues who contributed to MySpace’s success and are directly affected by the changes. Through no fault of theirs our company’s size became unsustainable. The future success of MySpace is dependent upon us operating as a nimble and entrepreneurial company with the adaptive mentality of a start-up.

I believe this is the first difficult step toward a major turnaround – a step that will not only shore us up in the short term, but position us for long term success. We need to become a more innovative company. Becoming more innovative is an ongoing responsibility for all of us, not a one-time effort. We are developing a process that will empower anyone in the company to contribute ideas and enable us to integrate your thoughts into our plans for the future. We will follow-up with details on this process in the coming weeks.

This week we will communicate the foundation for our company strategy. In the days ahead, I will visit a number of U.S. offices, starting tomorrow at HQ, MySpace Music, and El Segundo. On Thursday I look forward to seeing everyone in Seattle and San Francisco, and on Friday, I’ll be spending time with the team based in New York.

I’m honored to be working with you on the next phase of MySpace and I’m grateful for your patience during this difficult process.

Thank you,
Owen

One way to fix that: Turn the entire homepage into a giant ad. Like this one for Fox’s newest iteration of “Night At The Museum” (click to enlarge):

Web sites like News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace have been turning their homepages into giant ads for quite some time, and in some cases it’s been very effective. But as far as I know, this is the first time a search engine has tried it. I’ve got a query (get it?) into the Ask folks and will report back when I hear from them.

UPDATE: Ask spokesguy Nicholas Graham tells me that this isn’t the first time the search engine has offered up its homepage for takeovers. Ask has done it a couple times for charitable causes and it did the same thing last November for “Quantum of Solace,” the most recent James Bond flick. In the case of both that movie and the new “Night at the Museum,” Ask doesn’t get paid for the ad–instead, it gets an in-kind payment via mentions in the films.

Here’s a screenshot of the last takeover Ask did, in April, for Autism Speaks. In that case, the takeover ads also featured hot spots (the boxed question marks) that turned into questions when users moused over them (click to enlarge).