Michael Arrington posted over the weekend about CPA offers within social games and questioned why facebook, myspace, zynga and others would expose these to our users. He raises good points about ‘scammy’ advertisers and the bad user experience they create. I agree with him and others that some of these offers misrepresent and hurt our industry.

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A moment of sympathy, please, for newspapers, whose readers and advertisers have been fleeing at a frightening rate.

It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption and to insist that the industry’s proper reward for decades of haughty attitude, bad planning, and incompetence is bankruptcy.

But newspapers have really, really tried to wrap their hands around the future and preserve their franchise, an insight I owe to Pablo J. Boczkowski’s 2004 book, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. The industry has understood from the advent of AM radio in the 1920s that technology would eventually be its undoing and has always behaved accordingly.

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Earnings estimates for Baidu (BIDU) continue to head lower in the wake of the recent controversy over search-related advertising on the site by unlicensed medical companies. A pair of analysts who are otherwise bullish on the stock today chopped their forecasts for the China-based Internet company.

Dick Wei, a Hong Kong based analyst at J.P. Morgan, today cut his earnings forecasts for the company by five percent for this year and 19 percent for 2009, citing weaker revenue from the medical and pharmaceutical sector given actions the company has taken to block some advertisers in the wake of the recent controversy, as well as macro headwinds that he thinks could impact online ad spending by small- and medium-sized businesses.

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Here’s the thing about the TV business: It’s only as profitable or as valuable as the people who watch it. And if the only people who watch it are senior citizens strapped by debt, it’s not worth much–not to advertisers, anyway.

When Viacom posted second-quarter results yesterday, the company admitted its TV business hit a snag. Global advertising sales grew just two percent, and U.S. ad sales only eked out one-percent growth. Ad volume “dropped off” mid-quarter, according to Viacom president and CEO Philippe Dauman.

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