Along with a band of banks, Facebook is asking a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit accusing the social network of misleading investors about its financial state prior to its $16 billion IPO. As Reuters reports: “The defendants said … that before the IPO last May 18, Facebook had no obligation to publicly disclose internal projections on how increased mobile usage and product decisions might affect future revenue, even if it had provided the projections to its underwriters' analysts.” 

On average, advertisers now spend "north of six figures" on their Tumblr campaigns. So David Karp, Tumblr CEO, said Wednesday. “The 6-year-old blogging medium has lagged far behind Facebook and Twitter in the money-making department,” CNet writes. “The company has been trying to change that in recent months as it pushes a more aggressive strategy to get big brands to pay top dollar to reach its highly influential community.” 

Scratching another strategic acquisition off its own to-do list, Yahoo just bought to-do list app Astrid. “The app offered a unique take on the to-do list genre by syncing up with the TaskRabbit API to allow users to outsource tasks that they didn’t want to do themselves,” The Next Web notes. Apparently, striking a cord with users, Astrid’s apps have been downloaded over 4 million times, the startup said. 

Consumers can’t trust Yahoo, Apple, or Verizon with their personal information, according to a new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which ranks companies based on their privacy policies and law enforcement guidelines. Worse still, “Out of the 18 major Web and technology companies listed, only six firms had five out of six stars rating how far they will go to either protect users from the government or even fight on their behalf in court,” ZDNet reports. 

What can the industry expect from Facebook’s first-quarter earnings report, later today? Slow mobile ad growth, for one, because, as The Wall Street Journal writes, “the first quarter is typically lighter for ad-centric businesses because fewer brands spend as aggressively as during the fourth-quarter holiday shopping season.” Yet, “results will likely be boosted by increasing adoption of the Facebook Exchange,” WSJ adds. 

Hulu Plus now has 4 million subscribers paying $8 a month, the company said of its subscription service this week. “That’s not nearly as much Netflix, which boast some 30 million subscribers for its ad-free service (also $8 a month),” AllThingsD notes. “But that seems awfully respectable to me, considering that Hulu Plus has been around (in one form or another) for less than three years.” 

Yahoo’s plan to buy a 75% stake in French video site Dailymotion appears to be dead on arrival. As for what went wrong, Reuters points to the French government, which owns a 27% stake in Dailymotion parent France Telecom. “French government officials had raised concerns that the country would lose control over one of its biggest Internet industry successes if the deal went ahead,” Reuters reports, citing sources.