Online Advertising

A lot of folks look down their noses at the prospect of Facebook penetrating the corporate world in a meaningful fashion. In fact, many people believe that the IT community will do everything possible to resist this prospect because of the security, privacy and compliance issues surrounding the soci...

With more than 60 million users, Twitter clearly is a successful social media platform. However, the question of whether it also can be a successful business has yet to be answered. On Monday, Twitter proved that it's serious about making an effort to become a profitable enterprise when it banned th...

Twitter's No. 1 focus is now on revenue, and the social-networking Web site wants to reassure software developers that they will get a piece of the growing pie. At Twitter's first-ever conference for developers -- the Chirp conference being held in San Franscisco on Wednesday and Thursday -- the yo...

After months of questions about how Twitter plans on making money, the short message service and social media phenomenon on Tuesday launched its first foray into advertising. However, in doing so, the company made it clear that traditional corporate interests would take a back seat to overall custom...

Egged on by the chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, the Federal Trade Commission may be considering an effort to block Google's $750 million purchase of mobile advertising firm AdMob. The FTC reportedly is assembling a team of attorneys to h...

Google is trumpeting victory in a European court ruling over its practice of selling trademarks to competing firms for use in the search giant's paid results program. However, the EU court also set a new standard for national courts that could ultimately reshape how the company's $23 billion adverti...

The term "ROBO" -- Research Online, Buy Offline -- was coined by Yahoo to describe the growing number of consumers who research online but buy offline. Online "pre-shopping" has become a common activity prior to a variety of purchases. According to Forrester, online research will influence $1 tril...

Google's plan to acquire mobile ad network AdMob in a $750 million deal announced last month is under fire from two consumer groups, Consumer Watchdog and the Center for Digital Democracy. The two have asked the Federal Trade Commission to block the deal, arguing that it would substantially lessen c...

Yahoo has joined the growing number of companies updating their privacy policies with new tools to better manage the data that is collected about consumers. The company has launched a beta tool called "Ad Interest Manager" that shows users what interests Yahoo thinks they have based on their online ...

Facebook, meet Facecard -- a digital-age marriage of e-commerce and social networking, and that's what the founders of Edo Interactive intended in 2008 when they came up with the idea of prepaid debit cards, or Facecards. In fact, if you ask Edo Interactive CEO Ed Braswell the classic Facebook statu...

You may have seen the link recently sent to you by one of your Facebook friends: If the social network were its own country, it would be among the five largest in the world, thanks to its 300 million members. That "country" includes fertile, undiscovered territory for online advertisers, as represen...

Microsoft and Yahoo may be close to finalizing details on the elusive search and online advertising deal that the two have been flirting with for more than a year. Microsoft executives reportedly have flown from their Redmond headquarters to Silicon Valley to finalize details relating to the deploym...

Microsoft has initiated a civil lawsuit in the Western District of Seattle seeking $750,000 in damages from three individuals in Vancouver, British Columbia, for committing click fraud. The three alleged fraudsters are two brothers and a mother -- Eric Lam, Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen -- who, accord...

When the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) released its "Internet Ad Revenue Report" earlier this week, the common misperception that "banners are dead" was shaken to its foundation.