In a recent piece on C/NET, there's some chatter that the mortgage mess will ultimately lower online spending -- taking some of the wind out of biggies like Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO).

Hey, just based on my own browsing, I'm not seeing many mortgage banners. So should we be worried?

I had a chance to interview Frank Addante, who is a veteran of the online advertising world. He sold one of his companies to DoubleClick and his latest gig is The Rubicon Project.

When I look at Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) as I do periodically, I can not understand its valuation. I still have trouble with the valuation of Internet companies in general I suppose. Yahoo! closed yesterday at $24.95 per share and since it is one of our original eight blogging stocks it is on my watch-list.

During the course of the year I have read many buy (albeit speculative) opinions and it seems to stay in the news every day. But when I look at it as an investment I just cannot make any sense of it. There are many positive things I can think of about the company but a price-to-earnings ratio touching 49 is not one of them. It's too high! (Jim Cramer makes a different evaluation in his earlier post.)

It's nice that Yahoo! has no debt and I suppose if I wanted to speculate I would be encouraged that it is near a 52-week low. However this would not let me rest easy at night because I think that if earnings do not improve significantly it may be worth 35% less in the near future when others see what I see.

I see earnings that are weak and getting weaker. Yahoo! earned less in 2006 than 2005. In 2007 it earned less than 2006. As one of the prime pieces of web real estate this is not a good sign. Not only is Yahoo's earnings poor, but what it does with the earnings are not good either. It has an ROE, ROA and ROI that average about 7.7. so it's clear the company is not making a lot of money, nor does it know what to do with what it is making.

The 10 highest paid CEOs are amply rewarded -- earning an average of $58 million in the last year -- but they are not producing equally: three bargain CEOs created shareholder value on the cheap, three hogs added shareholder value but got paid too much to do so and four value destroyers were paid big bucks to lose shareholder value. Finding those bargain CEOs could be a great way to look for investment opportunities if you think that they can keep creating shareholder value at the same rate as they have in the past. (A map of the location of these CEOs is here.)

I calculate that in the last year, these 10 CEOs presided over the creation of $12 billion in stock market value -- their $58 million average CEO pay works out to 0.5% of that $12 billion in additional stock market value. But lest you get too excited, the average stock price of the 10 companies increased 12% while the S&P 500 rose 15%.

If CEOs were paid for value creation, I would expect all 10 of these companies to be contributing to that $12 billion in increased stock market value. But the reality is quite different -- four of the 10 destroyed shareholder value in the last year while the remaining six increased it. Who are the bargain CEOs, hogs, and value destroyers?