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Facebook was once a darling of investors, then a turnoff. Now, a year after going public, the social network seems to have settled into a more stable relationship with Wall Street. But the company has still been taking pains to prove that it can make more money from its base of more than a billion users, especially from those using Facebook on mobile devices.

Twitter's announcement today that it will let advertisers target pitches based on words people type in tweets has marketing types in a tizzy over the potential for another ad venue as effective as 's search ads.

Yahoo said its profit rose 36% as the struggling Internet pioneer showed signs of continuing its slow but steady rebound under Mayer. But its shares fell after-hours on signs of decay in sales of display ads.

France's government says it has persuaded a leading Internet provider to stop blocking online advertisements — a controversial move that would have hit online search giants such as Google.

The two-year-old drive to give consumers a simple way to block companies from tracking their behavior as they move across the Internet has faltered, say participants in the process who are struggling to reconcile privacy concerns with an advertising model that pays for many free Internet services.

Technologies that target ads to specific consumers, rather than aggregate audiences offered by publishers, are punishing newspaper, broadcast and magazine sites.

Groupon and its compatriots in the much-hyped daily deals business were supposed to change the very nature of small-business advertising. Instead, it is the daily deal vendors that are racing to change as evidence mounts that their business model is fundamentally flawed.

Shares in AOL have jumped 14% after the US internet firm reported a sharp rise in advertising revenues. Advertising sales jumped 7% to $340m (£212m), boosting net profit for the third quarter to $20.8m, compared with a loss of $2.6m a year ago.

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.