The New York Times continues its around-the-clock Microhoo watch and today, the big news is that the two sides are still not talking. However, it's clearly Microsoft's turn to make a move: the software giant's deadline to reach a merger agreement passed three days ago, after which point the company said it would seek to oust Yahoo's board and take its offer directly to shareholders. However, the strange silence from the Microsoft camp indicates that the company needed more time to ponder its next move, which could be one of three things: one, launching the aforementioned proxy battle; two, …

Spending on online promotions is set to triple from $8 billion in 2007 to a whopping $22 billion by 2012, surpassing both traditional banner and paid search advertising, according to new research. The study, conducted by Borrell Advertising, claims that online contests, giveaways, coupons, gift certificates and the like "are proliferating" because one, they engage consumers, and two, they forge a strong bond between the media company and the advertiser. "Local media companies that are genuinely helping those businesses grow, rather than merely selling advertising to them, are well positioned to succeed in this brave new world of marketing," the …

BusinessWeek's Jon Fine weighs in on Google's YouTube dilemma. Whereas AdWords and AdSense "are both simple, easily automated, and can scale to just about infinity," Fine points out that ads on YouTube cannot be automated as easily. And while just about anyone can afford to create and run an AdWords campaign without a salesforce, YouTube ads cost more and usually require the use of an ad agency, thus limiting its customer pool to larger advertisers. Fine says there's now a greater feeling of urgency inside the Googleplex that the online video giant needs to start contributing to the company's …

Mobile marketing presents both a challenge and an opportunity to Web advertising giant Google. While improvements to the mobile Web will cause more people to conduct searches on their cell phones, the cell phone's tiny screen means that Google will have less inventory to sell. On a standard computer screen the search leader can fit about 10 ads, but on a cell phone you get only one or two paid ads. Says BusinessWeek: "Imagine the horror that would befall your business if a large slice of what you sell suddenly disappeared. A similar fate could befall companies that depend on …