After just over a year on the job, deeply unqualified top Yahoo ad-sales executive Dave Karnstedt is leaving the company — to "pursue other opportunities," specifically as an yes-man executive-in-waiting at Redpoint Ventures. Replacing him at Yahoo will be Joanne Bradford, who only quit her ad sales post at Microsoft to become an EVP at at Los Angeles-based ad network Spot Runner in March. Tellingly, she'd been commuting to the job from the Bay Area, and employees at Spot Runner tell us Bradford didn't spend much time in the office.Bradford will report to Yahoo EVP Hilary Schneider, according to Kara Swisher. During her short tenure at Spot Runner, the company abandoned its original plan to help small businesses buy customized TV ads and laid off 50 in the process. That tumultuous experience should help prepare Bradford for Yahoo, according to a tipster who tells us "most of [Karnstedt's] lieutenants will be leaving with him shortly," and adds: "Taking bets on the next layoff announcement? 4 days before Q3 earnings. Jerry steps down too."

Only last year, the word on Madison Avenue was that while Google might be getting all the attention, Yahoo's human touch kept it in the game. No longer, with the disgraceful farewell Yahoo bid to star saleswoman Wenda Harris Millard, and its promotion of hapless nonentity Dave Karnstedt. Disgraced stock analyst Henry Blodget "chatted" with a "significant New York-headquartered customer of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo" and came away with numbers to close the case.

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — Yahoo ad-sales executive Dave Karnstedt is very nice, we hear. If by "nice" you mean "ineffective" and "over his head," his sniping critics say. We'll stick with just "nice," though, judging from his demeanor at this conference's online-advertising panel. He's so nice, in fact, that his voice keeps cracking during the panel as he talks about how Yahoo's going to grow traffic on websites it owns. (Funny, I thought traffic was dropping.) Yahoo has, it's true, been able to squeeze more revenue out of existing sites. But without substantial growth in its traffic, it's not clear how Karnstedt is going to make his numbers look, well, "nice."