Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor orchestrating a proxy battle to take control of Yahoo, aims to replace Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang along with the rest of the company's board at Yahoo's annual shareholder meeting on Aug. 1. Earlier this week, a lawsuit filed by angry Yahoo shareholders revealed details about an employee severance plan that encouraged existing workers to walk out on the company if the merger were to go through. Icahn estimated that the retention plan, which would have cost Microsoft $2.5 billion or more, effectively deterred the software giant from going through with the merger. …

CBS and other players in the online video space are experimenting with a series of new video ad formats, called bugs, tickers and skin. "Skin" ads appear in an image surrounding the video player window and will be the primary ad format for CBS' latest addition, "The Burly Sports Show", which is produced by Heavy and will appear on CBSSports.com. "Bugs" are logos that appear in text or graphics on or next to a video, and "tickers" are horizontal bars that usually run at the bottom of a video. This is just the beginning of building a …

The controversial practice of using a rival's trademark on Google.com to drive traffic to your site is once again coming under the microscope. So-called "piggybacking", in which smaller advertisers use another company's trademarked terms in their text ads to drive traffic to their sites, is on the rise, and while Google and others have policies against the tactic, disgruntled marketers say the practice often goes unchecked. Offline, "piggybacking" has long been a no-no, but on the Web, regulators have largely left the matter up to search providers like Google and MSN. Meanwhile, tensions over piggybacking have been mounting for …

A Delaware court unsealed a complaint filed by Yahoo shareholders claiming that a severance plan adopted by the Web giant was designed to quash Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid. The severance plan, sometimes called a "poison pill" would have made it more lucrative for Yahoo employees to walk out on the company after a Microsoft takeover. The move would have added between $462 million and $2.1 billion to Microsoft's costs, based on its offer of $44.6 billion, or $31 per share. In the complaint, shareholders alleged that Yahoo was "throwing sand in the gears of Microsoft's plans for a smooth …

Wikia Search, Jimmy Wales' wiki-based approach to Google slaying, is more than a year old now, but audience measurement firm Hitwise said its traffic is still too small to measure. It's also far from being critically acclaimed: in the blogosphere, critics have canned the fledgling search engine, deeming it "miles behind the competition" and "an inexcusable waste of time." Badly in need of a redo, Wiki Search founder Jimmy Wales on Tuesday announced the search engine's relaunch; this time, users will actually be able edit and filter search results -- a feature missing from the beta and alpha launches. …

Kara Swisher, purveyor/co-host of last week's D Conference, which saw the likes of News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, and Yahoo's Jerry Yang discuss (among other things) the Microsoft-Yahoo merger collapse, said that just about every major media exec who appeared at the show not from Microsoft or Yahoo believes that the two companies should now just go and get a deal done. Swisher claims that the near unanimous advice stemmed from the belief that neither company stands a chance of catching up with Web advertising leader Google without joining forces. According to her sources, …

In a 310-page report called "U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning," Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay boldly argues that Google and Amazon are best positioned to withstand the poor economic climate and later emerge as the Web's leading companies. Despite a looming recession, both companies should maintain annual growth rates of between 30% and 40%, he said. However, Lindsay expects other players like Yahoo and IAC/InterActiveCorp to fall by the wayside. Yahoo will eventually be sold to Microsoft, he said, and IAC will go ahead with its five-way split and then gradually fade away. "Arguably the weakest …