Online Advertising

Facebook can be an effective platform for advertisers, according to a report released Tuesday by comScore. The results appear to counter the findings of a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll in which four out of five respondents claimed they were never influenced by advertisements or comments on the site rega...

PayPal has been working for a year or more to translate its brand of safe online payment to other channels. It has rolled out several products to establish bona fides in the mobile payment space, as well as among brick-and-mortar retailers. Now it is making the same push for the TV viewer. It is joi...

A new poll does not bode well for Facebook's goal of stepping up its ad revenue. Four out of five Facebook users said they were never influenced by advertising or even comments on the site to buy a product or service, found the poll, which was conducted by Reuters/Ipsos. Thirty-four percent of the...

Five major cable service providers in the United States are teaming up to allow their high-speed Internet customers access each other's metro WiFi networks. The five are Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable. The agreement will create a chain of more t...

Twitter has made an important overture to privacy advocates: It is giving users the ability to opt out of being tracked on the service by enabling the Do Not Track feature in the Firefox browser. Ed Felten, chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission, broke the news at an industry even...

General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook because the ad campaigns are not paying off in any measurable way. At $10 million, the company's ad spend on Facebook is relatively small. The reaction to GM's decision, however, has been disproportionately big. The timing of the news, of course, ...

It pays to advertise, right? Not necessarily, as Oracle found out when it tangled with IBM recently over advertisements in which Oracle claimed its servers were faster and much less expensive than IBM hardware. Unlike Oracle's headline-grabbing Java copyright and patent infringement suit against Goo...

Social network MySpace settled with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission Tuesday over charges related to how the site was using members' personal information. The social network had access to personal data from users, including their full names, ages and genders. MySpace promised users it would not sha...

Yelp reported a net loss in its first quarter as a publicly traded company after aggressive expansion abroad led to a sharp increase in costs. The site, which provides online reviews of local businesses, released its earnings on Wednesday for its first ever fiscal quarter after filing its IPO. Yelp ...

Interest in the United States Federal Trade Commission's antitrust probe into Google was given a jolt with the commission's decision to enlist seasoned white-collar crime litigator Beth Wilkinson to head the investigation. "When we have the opportunity to augment our team by bringing on a lawyer wit...

Facebook is rolling out its Facebook Offers service, a way for users to get discounts and promotions from local businesses via the social networking site. The offers will be distributed through users' Facebook news feeds. Users can then sign up to receive the offers via email and redeem them at pa...

It appears that Yahoo and shareholder Third Point are digging in for a contentious proxy fight. The companies have been tussling over who will fill four seats on the board of directors, with the two sides clashing on several points, including whether Third Point CEO Daniel Loeb should get one of th...

Yahoo filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook on Monday, ensnaring the social network heavyweight in a legal entanglement weeks before it's scheduled to go public. The suit regards 10 patents related to instant messaging, advertising systems, privacy settings and methods for customizing...

Pandora reported a 62 percent increase year-over-year in active users for its fiscal fourth-quarter, which ended Jan. 31, along with a 74 percent increase in advertising revenue and a 99 percent rise in listening hours. However, those gains were accompanied by increases in royalty payments the onlin...

Yelp had an excellent first day as a publicly traded company. It opened on the New York Stock Exchange Friday at $22.01 per unit -- up 47 percent from its IPO price of $15. By the end of the day, shares were trading at $24.58. The first-hour pop was surprising, even for enthusiastic advocates of the...