• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, November 5, 2010

Thanks to a better-than-expected ad market, CBS Corp. this week said its online display ad revenues grew 17% in the third quarter of the year. Regarding broader content distribution, Les Moonves, CBS Corp.'s president and CEO, said he remains wary of existing models from Hulu to Google TV.

The company is "exploring various platforms and will make a variety of deals when it makes sense," Moonves said this week, while his chief concern remains TV advertising, which still equals "far more dollars than they do on digital."

Late last month, CBS, along with ABC and NBC, began blocking their content from streaming on Google's new Web-TV service.

Google had "come to us [and the other networks] long before they launched Google TV to cut a deal," a network source told Online Media Daily at the time. "To this point we have not. It's still possible we will."

CBS had no comment regarding Google TV, but the accepted wisdom is that all the networks are wary of Google gaining too much control over their premium online content, and afraid they will not be fairly compensated under any terms.

Presently, Google TV doesn't alter the ads that networks package with their online content. The fear, however, is that it might seek to serve its own ads alongside the content in the future, and not make the move worthwhile for the networks.

More broadly, advertising at CBS Corp. was up 10% to $1.99 billion in the third quarter, as ad sales at CBS Television Network grew 7%. Overall, net earnings were up 133% to about $441 million.

Year-over-year, however, revenue in the quarter declined 2% from $3.35 to $3.30 billion from $3.35 billion.

Still, "CBS's strong momentum continues to grow across our businesses," said Moonves. "Just as we saw last year, each quarter in 2010 is delivering higher profits than the quarter before."