After Google bought ad-serving firm DoubleClick in March 2007, Microsoft rushed onto the market in May 2007 and paid — most say overpaid — $5.9 billion for aQuantive and its three businesses: Atlas, DrivePM and digital agency Avenue A/Razorfish. Microsoft never wanted Avenue A, which investment bankers calculate to be worth about $800 million, buying it only because it came with the aQuantive package. Now AdWeek reports that Microsoft ha found a way to dump Avenue A/Razorfish on media-holding company WPP:

Selling DailyCandy to Comcast for $125 million, Bob Pittman earned a 36x return on his 2003 $3.5 million acquisition of the company. Pretty sweet. But investors who bought into the company during its last funding round in 2006, and any employees who joined the the email newsletter for women since then, didn't do nearly so well. As VentureBeat reminds us, that round set DailyCandy's value as high as $140 million. Any shareholders who bought in then are going to lose money on the deal, unless they had a liquidation preference which allowed them to get their money back. That money, in turn, would have come out of the hide of employees, whose common shares would be diluted by shares issued to make the investors whole. So while DailyCandy's sale will renew respect for the one-time, one-eyed AOL boss Bob Pittman's dealmaking abilities — we heard Comcast wanted to pay just $75 million — working for him seems to be a suckers' bet.

The completely fabricated demand for Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards — the subject of white-hot, Weinstein-fueled media speculation until a real phenomenon worth covering came along — is reportedly entering the realm of fact on its way to a deal at Universal. Variety notes today that the Weinsteins may partner with the studio for a 2009 release; few other details are available except that Paramount is/was the second choice of Tarantino and Harvey Weinstein and, of course, a conveniently planted reminder that Tarantino met with Brad Pitt in his recent casting quest.

Among the newest investors in JimmyJane, designers of some of the world's most expensive and silent vibrators, who just closed their Series D? A fund managed by venture capitalist Tim Draper, most known to readers for his love of rousing songs about startups. Rather than make him a Songs To Get Off With 24K Gold Vibrators By mixtape, we offer the following inspirational lyric for you to run your batteries off with: "JimmyJane says, I need some VC dough / I'm gonna come tomorrow ..."

Microsoft is inking a deal to run its search results and keyword-linked ads on Facebook, CNBC reports. Make no mistake: Facebook employees share every bit as much disdain for Microsoft's lame Web efforts as the rest of Silicon Valley, despite the company's $240 million investment. So this news is unwelcome, and painful. But inevitable. What caused it?Facebook's slapdash decisionmaking about ad placement on the site, a direct result of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's endless dithering on the subject in the process of redesigning, led to the Microsoft search deal. In the end, Facebook decided to kick Microsoft's tacky banners off its homepage and users' profile pages, in favor of its own targeted Social Ads. That was a violation of Facebook's advertising agreement with Microsoft, of course, requiring a renegotiation of the deal. Microsoft, of course, was ready with its quid pro quo: Search advertising, a market Facebook has yet to tap, but was likely to eager to try to explore itself. Instead, it's running Microsoft search results, and Microsoft search ads, both of which are considerably less attractive than Google's because they draw a smaller base of users and advertisers. A hard lesson for Zuckerberg: Every decision has consequences, and pursuing his whims has costs.

BlogHer, the world's largest network of mommybloggers and women who are not mommies, has a new deal with NBC Universal: $5 million from their Peacock Equity fund, and a partnership with iVillage, the leading pastel content provider for ladies. More baby stuff and diet ads will follow at BlogHer, yes, but "we've been able to syndicate ads that make our bloggers happy," says BlogHer cofounder, Lisa Stone. Ads are just the acrylic tip of it.

This... is odd. UK newspaper company Guardian Media Group just bought a blog! For more than $30 million! (To be fair, that's like 10 million quid now probably, but still.) The blog is paidContent; it covers dry internet media news and chronicles lots of important business-y stuff involving "digital media." It's a very nice site, but $30 million? While media stocks tank? For a site whose revenue comes from, like, bankers making money off media deals? Ok, Guardian! It's your money! But there's more good news: this deal will annoy Jason Calacanis!

Old Dog, New Tricks: The heartbreaking vacancy of the old CAA headquarters, which drew nearly 20,000 Michael Ovitz-era mourners to like a sprawling, marble mecca to extinguished power, has been resolved at last. After haggling with a star chamber of landlords including Ovitz himself, Sony BMG Music Entertainment closed a deal Wednesday to relocate its West Coast headquarters to the 65,000-square-foot black hole at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica. Reports put the lease at $4 per square foot and "operating expenses of between $700,000 and $900,000 per year," which include inherited maintenance like office exorcisms, vintage employee execution chambers and a mysterious $370,000 annual allowance for something called "asshole removal." Security guards, maybe? Moving boxes? Your guess is as good as ours. [Variety]

Microsoft's latest plan: acquire Yahoo's search business and convince either Time Warner or News Corp to snatch up the rest. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo board chairman Roy Bostock had a meeting scheduled Monday to discuss the plans, but Ballmer called it off at the last minute, reports the Wall Street Journal. Yahoo sources took the cancellation to mean Ballmer couldn't persuade News Corp's chairman Rupert Murdoch or Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes to do the deal. They're probably right about Bewkes. Word has it he's hoping Yahoo will buy Time Warner's AOL, not the other way around. As for Murdoch, he's been willing to hand over MySpace for Yahoo stock since at least last year, but perhaps like us, he's wondering why anyone would make a move for Yahoo shares right now, when they don't seem to be going anywhere but down. (Photo by xamad)

Microsoft offered $1 billion to take Yahoo's search business off its hands, along with a buyback and other details. Henry Blodget has a detailed financial analysis of why Yahoo walked. But why spend all that effort? Rumor had had Microsoft offering $21 billion for Yahoo's search business a few weeks ago; it had already offered to pay $44.6 billion for the whole company. The $1 billion figure was a nice, round deliberate insult — a way for Microsoft executives, so desperate to get their hands on Yahoo's search business a few months ago, to say that they thought it was virtually worthless now. Microsoft's offensive intent was transparent; Yahoo walked, and took Google's less-complicated, less troubling deal instead. Is further analysis needed?

Yahoo has admitted defeat, under the guise of openness. The company will start letting Google sell ads on Yahoo search results, generating as much as $800 million a year for Yahoo; the increase comes from Google's superior efficiency at matching ads to search queries and milking money from advertisers. Intriguingly, the reason Yahoo gave for ending talks with Microsoft was that Web search was integral to its business. Search may be, but not the ads that run alongside search?

Congratulations are in order this morning for Wayne McClammy, the first director ever to parlay a pair of unprintably named viral videos into a movie deal at a major studio. McClammy, whose Variety-redacted, Sarah Silverman-starring I'm Fucking Matt Damon and Jimmy Kimmel follow-up I'm Fucking Ben Affleck blew up earlier this year, was handed the reins for the Fox comedy Cool School, about "ad executives in their early thirties who are sent back to high school to learn how to be cool again." We'll reserve judgment for the time being — the script isn't even finished, and any way you slice it, it could be worse: At least Kevin Smith didn't wind up with a feature deal tied to that ill-advised Elizabeth Banks parody I'm Fucking Seth Rogen. What? He did? All right, well, no pressure, McClammy! No, literally — no pressure at all. [Variety]

Hewlett-Packard has software to automate datacenters; EDS has datacenters which need automating. That's part of the logic behind HP's $13.9 billion acquisition of the tech-services business. The deal proves that Marc Andreessen is prescient. After he sold Netscape to AOL, Andreessen launched LoudCloud, a website-hosting business powered by advanced software. In the wake of the bust, Andreessen sold the hosting part of the business to EDS, and relaunched the company as Opsware, the name of its automation software. HP bought Opsware last year. While reuniting LoudCloud's constituent parts isn't the reason why Mark Hurd is doing the deal, he is proving that Andreessen's early vision of combining software and services was on the money. Timing is everything.

Yahoo shares are hovering around $25 because investors hope major Yahoo shareholders can still force a deal with Microsoft at $33 per share or more. But at Google's annual shareholder meeting yesterday, cofounder Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt tried their best to destroy those hopes, amping up talk of a deal that would outsource Yahoo's search advertising to Google and make Yahoo unattractive to Microsoft. Brin said the deal is designed to keep Microsoft at bay. "[Yahoo was] under a hostile attack and we wanted to make sure they had as many options as possible," Brin said.

How badly does News Corp. want to move MySpace out the door? During yesterday's quarterly earnings call with analysts, News Corp. president and COO Pete Chernin and chairman Rupert Murdoch said they haven't discussed a merging properties with Microsoft, AOL or Yahoo in quite some time. Like maybe 14 days. Chernin: "I have not had a conversation with Microsoft or AOL in a couple of weeks." Rupert Murdoch "Nor have I." Silicon Alley Insider doesn't believe the disclaimers, reminding us that at the end of the last quarter, Murdoch denied interest in Yahoo even as he'd ordered a team to make the deal happen.

Former Yahoo executive Jeff Bonforte, now CEO of Xobni, has come up with possibly the most cynical yet useful product ever launched by a startup. Xobni, whose software tracks and analyzes email usage in Outlook, is rumored to be in acquisition talks with Microsoft. Microsoft is, to its dismay, not in acquisition talks with Yahoo. But Xobni's latest product, TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld reports, bridges Microsoft Outlook, desktop email software widely used in corporations, with Yahoo's Web-based email. "That's the kind of demo that gets deals done," Schonfeld observes. Indeed, it may make Microsoft wonder whether they need to buy Yahoo at all.

Ning founder Marc Andreessen is already on the record about Microsoft's proposed takeover of Yahoo: He thinks it will likely go through, and turn out to be a good deal. It's a remarkably sanguine take for someone who saw Netscape bought and destroyed by AOL. In a thorough analysis for which he dragooned two corporate lawyers, Andreessen elaborates: Yahoo has few defenses, aside from a poison pill, and Microsoft will likely succeed. For all its thoroughness, the analysis is less interesting for what it says about Microsoft-Yahoo than for what it says about Andreessen.

The eminently worthwhile Anti-Advertising Agency is offering the deal of a lifetime to one lucky robot who somehow found themselves stuck working in the soul-draining advertising industry: quit your job, and they'll cut you a check. For real! The pot stands at just $500 now, but they're accepting donations to raise it into the quadruple digits. A worthy cause! Whoever quits the marketing hellhole will also get "tips, training, and networking opportunities for future careers in the arts, journalism, volunteerism, social work, anthropology, mentalism, or poetry." They'll need that money for sure! We fully support this idea and encourage you all to donate to the freedom of a wage slave. The full press release, and how YOU can help set a soul afire, after the jump.

The industry has long known that Google's search ads are more profitable than Yahoo's. Yahoo put a team of rocket scientists on the problem, only to discover that it's actually harder than rocket science. Now, in extremis, Yahoo is hoping to evade Microsoft by replacing its own ads with Google's. A test has proved successful; analysts say Yahoo could boost its cash flow by $1 billion a year. Now, the problem becomes how to sneak a Yahoo-Google ad deal past antitrust regulators.

Yahoo and Google are in "advanced discussions" over search advertising. The talks, part of Yahoo's search to find an alternative to Microsoft's takeover bid, revolve around a short-term test that would embed Google ads around a "limited percentage" of Yahoo's search results. If it worked out well, a "broader search-ad outsourcing arrangement" could be made.