It is, indeed, D-day for Jerry Yang and the Yahoo board. At 5 p.m. EST time today we will know a lot more about the Web giant's fate: If earnings are poor, Yahoo's bluff will have been called by Microsoft and the company will be assumed by the software giant for $31 per share. If earnings area strong, there's a slim chance that Yahoo could convince shareholders to remain independent, but only in the event of an AOL merger and/or an expanded Google search partnership. Microsoft could also be forced to up its bid, a move that many feel would …

Google is the world's most powerful brand, according to WPP-owned research firm Millward Brown, with an estimated value of $86 billion. The search giant was well-ahead of No. 2 General Electric, whose estimated brand value is worth $71.4 billion. Microsoft was third at $70.89 billion, and Coca-Cola was fourth at $58.2 billion. Google, a company that spends almost no money on advertising, topped Millward Brown's annual 100 list for the second time in a row; in fact, the top five were unchanged year-over-year, each recording an increase in brand valuation by between 15% and 39%. Millward Brown compiles the …

Thanks in part to harried investment in MySpace, Rupert Murdoch has turned News Corp. into a "toxic stock." A pair of analysts, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Analyst Michael Nathanson and UBS AG's Michael Morris, recently lowered their price targets for the New York-based company after News Corp. said Fox Interactive Media, its Internet division, would miss its 2008 goal of $1 billion in revenue. Nathanson dropped his price target by 13% to $21, while Morris lowered his $1 to $25. News Corp. is currently trading at between $18 and $19 per share. The media giant is pouring investment …

Following boffo first quarter results from Google last Thursday, Kara Swisher tells readers to expect a similarly strong Q1 from Yahoo. Just look to Yahoo's recent behavior for some clues, she says. There's the audacious Google search partnership, a further opening of Yahoo's platform and yet another rejection letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Then, think about how Yahoo's business, "however weaker, follows along the very same tracks" as Google, which turned in impressive first quarter results last week. Also, note that CEO Jerry Yang hasn't been frantically making flights to and from Yahoo's Sunnyvale, Calif. HQ to Microsoft's Redmond, …

Social media users in the U.S. are more passive than their counterparts in Asia and South America, according to a new study. Whereas American consumers enjoy sharing videos and reading blogs, those in emerging markets are more likely to create content on blogs, social networks and content sharing sites. "By and large, in the U.S. we're a country of voyeurs," said David Cohen, U.S. director of digital communications at Interpublic Group's Universal McCann, which conducted the study. "We love to watch and consume content created by others, but there's a fairly small group that are doing that creation -- unlike …

As it turns out, comScore was wrong about Google's paid click growth: instead of being flat, the traffic measurement firm predicted, the search giant reported paid click growth of 20%. The discrepancy between comScore's figures and the actual figures reported by Google will come as no surprise to Madison Avenue, which, unfortunately, has grown used to the idea that Web traffic measurement is a far from perfect science. Indeed, digital ad execs say they take numbers from comScore and its rival, Nielson Online, with a grain of salt. "We have not expected the numbers to be 100% accurate," says Sarah …

A year ago, Google promised to lead the charge against one of the most prominent issues in online privacy, but the company has made little headway. The lack of progress underscores the Web industry's resistance to altering their practices with respect to cookies. After Google announced that it would purchase DoubleClick, which serves many of the display ads seen across the Web, privacy watchers raised concerns that the combination of Google's search data and DoubleClick's cookies would give one company too much information about individual Web users. Google responded by promising to deploy technology that would minimize the cookies' invasiveness. …