Kara Swisher hears that Yahoo is eying Demand Media for a partnership or possible sale that could fetch anywhere between $1.5-$3 billion. Costly though it may be, Swisher says a move for Demand is potentially savvy, especially since Yahoo has signaled an interest in becoming more social. Demand, which calls itself a "leader in social media," was founded by former Intermix CEO Richard Rosenblatt. The company groups together user-generated content and sells advertising against it. Demand is one of the biggest suppliers of video to YouTube, for example. It has upwards of 70 million unique visitors per month and around …

"YouTube is soaring towards the future like a pigeon towards a plate glass window," says Silicon Alley Insider contributor Benjamin Wayne. The online video sharing service is just too expensive to maintain even for a company the size of Google. According to Credit Suisse, YouTube's 2009 revenues will be about $240 million against operating costs of roughly $711 million. "No matter Google's $116 billion market cap: a half-billion dollar loss on a single property, even one as large as YouTube, is a bitter pill to swallow," Wayne notes. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Google CEO Eric …

Publishers are up in arms over the controversial practice of news aggregation. Recently, Robert Thomson, the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, called sites like TechMeme, a popular tech news aggregator, a "tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internet." Dean Singleton, chairman of The Associated Press, had this to say about the practice: "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore." In an interview with CNet, TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera argues that news aggregators serve only to promote content. "All successful Web publishers want their content quoted and linked," Rivera said in an email. …

YouTube is now selling ads against 9% of its video inventory, up from just 6% a year ago, Ad Age's Michael Learmonth reports. According to Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube's director-product management, the company is selling ads against "hundreds of millions of views" each month. He added that YouTube sells ads on more videos than its nearest competitor, Fox Interactive Media, has total views. According to comScore, FIM had 463 million views in February; or 8.7% of YouTube's 5.3 billion views for the month. Learmonth says the gains are due to a number of factors, from more content agreements with big partners …

Google CEO Eric Schmidt reiterated his company's belief that "advertising is king" during a keynote address at the Newspaper Association of America's annual conference on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. And while there may be room for other media business models, like subscriptions and micropayments, he said these would not operate on the same scale as ad-supported media, because those models rely on scarcity, while the Internet "works on ubiquity." Meanwhile, many of the publishers at the NAA conference are struggling with the Web's "everything is free" mentality, as online dollars have not sufficiently recouped lost revenue from their …

The executive exodus at Google continues. Last month, AOL announced that it was hiring the company's top sales executive, Tim Armstrong, as its chairman and CEO. Yesterday, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Google's president for Asia Pacific & Latin American Operations, said she was leaving to join the venture capital firm Accel Partners, whose investment portfolio includes Facebook, Glam Media, Macromedia and MetroPCS. On Tuesday, the search giant also lost its Latin America director, Gonzalo Alonso. Singh Cassidy joins Accel as its "CEO in Residence", where she'll help Accel's portfolio companies with the option of becoming chief executive of one of its …

If Yahoo co-founder David Filo and CEO Carol Bartz have their way, then the Web giant's online properties will soon look a lot like Facebook, Reuters says in a new report. The company hopes the new strategy will help bring Yahoo's disparate properties together, and reel in new advertising and user growth. Analysts said that advertisers would follow if Yahoo's social networking features catch on with users. "People are spending time on Twitter and Facebook, but advertisers don't want to be there right now. That's the big issue," said JMP Securities analyst Sameet Sinha. "But Yahoo advertisers are already there." …

New Media Age has the scoop on a new Twitter-backed company that helps brands leverage the microblogging service. Universal Pictures, Virgin Media and Gorillaz are among the first brands to launch commercial services through the new company, which has been set up by angel investor and entrepreneur Peter Read with a high-profile board of advisors including Lastminute.com founders Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, Last.fm founder Stefan Glaenzer, Lovefilm co-founder Saul Klein, former Sky online marketing director Scott Gallacher and former Yahoo VP Toby Coppel. Twitter is understood to have taken an equity stake in the new firm. The popular …

How good is Eric Schmidt, really? Not that good, says Silicon Alley Insider's Joe Weisenthal, who likens the Google CEO to former eBay boss Meg Whitman, a non-founding CEO "who was lauded as a genius for years thanks to the success of the company...but whose contribution to that success was likely highly overrated." As Google's revenue growth slows, Google shareholders might want to ask themselves what Schmidt has done that "any moderately competent executive" wouldn't have done at the helm. Is he really a great CEO, or has he merely just been in the right place at the right time? …