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(Reuters) - The New York Times Co reported worse-than-expected results on Thursday as advertisers cut spending on both print and digital outlets, sending shares down 12 percent.

Facebook lost $59 million in the third quarter, but the newly publicly traded social networking site saw its shares soar on Wall Street early Wednesday. Facebook shares gained $4.35, or 22%, to $23.85 in early trading, after the company reported gains from mobile advertising.

Advertisers are girding for battle against browser mechanisms intended to offer more online privacy. At stake is nothing less than the future of the surveillance economy.

...There’s also the issue that these mobile ads are completely new. Users don’t know any better and happen to click on them. However, over time (and probably pretty quickly), they will learn to avoid these new ads. When banner ads began in the 1990s, CTRs over 5% were common. They are currently 0.2 – 0.3%.

A commerce site called Limited Run, in announcing that it was deleting its Facebook page, claimed that 80 percent of its ad-clicks on Facebook came from "bots" or automated accounts, and only a fifth from genuine users.

Facebook’s results illustrated a reality for social media: It’s a soft sell medium in which advertising may not be that interesting or relevant to consumers. This is important because it means the revenue potential for social media companies such as Facebook may not be as high as many people assumed.

Foursquare is rolling out its first revenue product as the company moves from focusing on user growth to generating cash. The new Promoted Updates enables businesses to send promoted content to users. These updates will appear at the top in a prominent position in the “Explore” tab in Foursquare. That’s the section of the app that is for users to find businesses nearby. The Promoted Updates, like Google search ads, there is “intent” there while users are looking for a restaurant, bar or other business nearby, says Steven Rosenblatt, Foursquare’s chief revenue officer. Businesses pay on a “cost per action” performance basis for these ads. In some ways these updates are also like Twitter’s promoted Tweets.

Microsoft said Thursday that an accounting adjustment to reflect a weak online ad business led to its first quarterly loss in its 26 years as a public company. The software company had warned that it was taking a $6.2 billion charge because its 2007 purchase of online ad service aQuantive hasn't yielded the returns envisioned by management. The non-cash adjustment is something companies do when the value of their assets decline. Microsoft Corp. paid $6.3 billion for aQuantive, only to see rival Google Inc. expand its share of the online ad market.

The design of Tumblr, the blogging tool and social network, is guided by feeling. In particular, the feelings of David Karp, the company’s 26-year-old founder, whose instincts tend to run counter to current Web conventions. Tumblr does not display “follower” counts, for example, or other numerical markers of popularity that are viewed as crucial social-media features, because Karp finds them “really gross.” The culture of public friend-and-follow reciprocity that theoretically expands a social networking service can, in his view, “really poison a whole community.”

Microsoft cut some advertising and marketing jobs on Wednesday, the company confirmed to the Wall Street Journal. "I can confirm that there were job eliminations today at Microsoft," a company spokeswoman told the WSJ via email.