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Time Warner’s second-quarter earnings beat analysts’ expectations. But that’s not saying much, really. Profits fell 34 percent to $519 million, or 43 cents a share, from $792 million, or 66 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue was down nine percent to $6.8 billion.

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When Google took a five percent stake in AOL for $1 billion in 2005, it valued the company at about $20 billion. Last year the search giant wrote down $726 million of that investment. And now, according to a regulatory filing, Google has gone and sold its share back to Time Warner for $283 million, about a quarter of what it originally paid for it.

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QOTD

Yahoo-AOL would not happen anytime in the forever future. Yahoo is a much stronger property in a different direction and there’s no sense confusing all of that.

– Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz about a hook-up with the Time Warner (TWX) online unit.

If there was an over-arching theme for this last week on All Things D, it would have to be musical chairs.

Brand new MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta started things off Monday with his first day on the job. He was joined by new COO and former AOL exec Mike Jones and new chief product officer and former Sling Media exec Jason Hirschhorn.

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Welcome back to Weekend Update, where we showcase some of the highlights from this site over the past week. In the umpteenth round of the old versus new media match, the Associated Press in its annual meeting this week played into the stereotype of the grizzled no-nonsense editor who shakes his fist at the new interweb thing (or was it intertube?) and its feisty friend, Google News, who are running amok on his lawn.

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Here’s further confirmation that Time Warner is looking to spin off AOL. In an SEC filing Monday, the company said it is seeking to amend debt agreements that restrict it from unloading the struggling business. Coming as it does after the hiring of Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive, as AOL CEO and chairman, the move would seem to suggest that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has given up on the idea of an AOL merger with Yahoo and is pushing ahead full-bore with a spinoff.

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In Silicon Valley, it’s hard to believe that not everyone follows each shiny new thing on the Web, tracks OS versions as intently as the storyline for “Battlestar Galactica” and remains jacked-in pretty much 24/7. But it’s been known to happen.
For instance, BoomTown was in Rome earlier this week attending a conference on business, brand and innovation that happens only once every seven years–and one of the biggest takeaways? Hardly any Italians have heard of Twitter, and those who have don’t really use it.

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The best thing that can be said of the week ending Oct. 10, 2008, is this: It’s over.

Marked by panic selling and wet-your-pants fear, it was one of the worst weeks in the financial world’s history–a week that cut the legs out from under Google, beat Yahoo until its market cap bled purple and caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to swing more than one thousand points on an intra-day basis.

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Looks like Carl Icahn did show up to his first Yahoo board meeting, though it appears he wasn’t able to get much done. The new board, which also includes former Viacom CEO Frank Biondi and former CEO of Nextel Partners, John Chapple, reportedly met Tuesday and decided as a first course of business to talk to Time Warner about the future of its AOL division.

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Disciplined capital allocation is a key priority for Time Warner. That said, the company “may have overpaid” for Bebo, the social-networking site it acquired for $850 million cash back in March. So said Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes in an interview with Portfolio.

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QOTD

This is the first major combination of an online company and a bricks-and-mortar media company. It’s the deal that everyone will have to follow.

Together, they represent an unprecedented powerhouse. If their mantra is content, this alliance is unbeatable. Now they have this great platform they can cross-fertilize with content and redistribute.”

– Ben Rogoff, manager of Aberdeen Asset Management and Bear Stearns analyst Scott Ehrens comment on the AOL-Time Warner merger, circa 2000