Web Trends

Four Out of Five US Households Use Online Banking Services
A recent consumer survey conducted by Fiserv Inc., a provider of financial services technologies, notes that four out of five U.S. households with Internet access now use online banking services. More...

Community and Content Take Up More Time
The latest figures released by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) show that content-related online activities still take up most of the average user’s time, followed by communications- and commerce-related activities. More...

Firefox 3.1 beta 2 Will Please Porn Lovers
TraceMonkey and Private Browsing. They sound dirty, don’t they? More...

Time Warner Cable Begins Test to limit Broadband
Everyone knew something like this was coming sooner or later. Today we can all exhale, because Time Warner Cable has taken the first step towards limiting broadband access More...

Latin America’s Web Landscape
Recent figures released, by comScore World Metrix, paint a broad picture of what the Internet landscape looks like in Latin America. More...

Asia Pacific Region Boasts Biggest Internet Audience
A recent report titled “Digital World: State of the Internet” released by comScore shows that the U.S. can only boast about 21% of the worldwide Internet audience, which is a dramatic drop from the 66% share it had in 1996 More...

U.K. Continues Strong Online Ad Spending
Online ad spending in the U.K. is expected to reach $6.4 billion in 2008, after reaching $5.3 billion in 2007, according to eMarketer. More...

Women > Men Online
The U.S. population is made up of more females (154.5 million) than males (149.4 million) in 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More...

Does Banner Advertising Still Work? A DR Advertisers Perspective
With the advent of ad networks and the availability of ad exchanges, why is it such a challenge to get banner inventory to convert? There is no easy answer as each site and each advertiser have their own unique challenges. We all measure our returns differently. More...

White paper: Maximizing the ROI of online lead generation campaigns
Imagine a car burning up the autobahn leaving even the best European designs in the dust. The only catch being that the fuel needed to power this vehicle was far from perfect. More...

Google’s Search Share Drops in December
Google handled 56.3% of all U.S. search queries in December, which was a drop from November’s 57.7% share. Its searches per user also decreased from 40.8 in November to 37.9 in December. More...

Google Sites Continue Lead in Online Video
Recent figures released by comScore Video Metrix show that Google Sites pumped up its online video market share to 31.3% in November, an increase of more than two percent from October. Almost 3 billion videos were viewed on... More...

Financial Services Dominate Online Ad Spending (For Now)
A December 2007 report released by Nielsen Online AdRelevance shows that financial service firms spent more than a quarter of a million dollars on online display advertising, or 29% of all money spent on online ad spending. More...

China’s Online Population Reaches 210 Million
According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the online population in China has reached 210 million, a whopping 53% increase from last year’s 137 million online population. This puts China on pace to... More...

Leveraging Social Networking Sites: Online Lead Generation
Two out of every three Internet users visit a social networking site each day, according to the web statistics company, Compete. This means that social networking sites are quickly approaching the traffic level of the big portals like... More...

More Phishing Attacks in 2007
Phishing attacks in the U.S. cost unknowing victims $3.2 billion in 2007. For the year ending August 2007, 3.6 million adults in the U.S. lost money because of these attacks, More...

Professional Content Still King
Adults in the U.S. watch more professionally-produced television programming than they do user-generated videos on “alternative devices”, which includes computers, mobile devices, and digital media players. More...

Women More Likely to Buy on Impulse Online
A recent survey conducted by GSI Commerce shows that 55% of women between the ages of 45-54 make impulse buys online, compared to 38% of men in the same age range. More...

Peer Reviews Influence Consumer Behavior
Though there are many factors that influence online browsers to make purchases, fellow users’ reviews seem to be very important. More...

Online TV Video Content Enhances Experience
According to a recent report released by Horowitz Associates, 61% of high-speed Internet users watch or download online video content at least once a week, while 86% do so once every month. Last year, these numbers were 45% and 71%, respectively. More...

Amazon Offers Customer Video Reviews
Amazon.com recently unveiled customer video reviews on its site, which allows customers to post their reviews of products in WMV, MPEG, Quicktime, or AVI formats. More...

Cell Phone-Only Homes Overtake Landline-Only Homes
For the first time ever, cell phone-only households are more popular than landline-only households, according to the most recent Mediamark Research report titled “The Birth of a Cellular Nation.” More...

Small Businesses to Spend Big Bucks Online
According to JupiterResearch, total online spending by small businesses was $47 billion in 2006. However, according to the firm’s recent report titled “US Online Small Business Market Category Forecast, 2007 to 2012,” this figure... More...

Local Online Advertising to Grow
A recent report released by eMarketer titled “Local Online Advertising: Measuring the Market” shows that while only a small portion of total local advertising spending is being sent towards online efforts today, there is likely... More...

Google, Microsoft, eBay Popular in the U.K.
Bucking a trend that usually sees a decreased day-to-day media consumption during the summer holiday season, the total online population in the U.K. actually reached its largest size ever in July. With 31.8 million unique online... More...

Beckham Bends MLS Web Traffic
Regardless of whether or not David Beckham can boost soccer’s popularity in the states, it appears that his boost in Major League Soccer’s Web popularity is the real deal. According to recent comScore figures, Beckham has... More...

Moms Rely on Search Engines
According to DoubleClick Performics’ recent "Searcher Moms - A Search Behavior and Usage Study" (which was conducted with help from Microsoft and ROI Research) moms are heavily dependent on search engines as a... More...

Consumers Trading Old Technologies for New
U.K. telecommunications watchdog Ofcom has noticed a trend of people passing up older technologies in favor of newer ones. Everyone knows television and radio are attracting fewer eyeballs and ears lately, but so are... More...

American Youngsters Must Have Their Internet
"You simply cannot separate young people from technology; it is part of who they are." This was the conclusion that eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson came to in... More...

Facebook is Costly for Australia
Facebook has grown in popularity in Australia over the past several months, according to Hitwise. By the end of July, Facebook was one of the top 20 sites visited by Aussies across every category. This is great news for Facebook... More...

Mozilla Targets Malicious Sites
Mozilla’s Firefox browser has been gaining popularity over the past few years, but its success has not satisfied its developers. For Firefox 3.0, Mozilla hopes to develop two defenses against dangerous Web sites for Firefox users. More...

Yahoo is Popular in Japan
comScore recently released its first report detailing the top Web properties and the top gaining Web properties in Japan for the month of June. The figures took into account all unique visitors age 15 and over who browsed the Internet... More...

Content is Bigger Than Search
A four-year study conducted by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) indicates that Internet users in the U.S. spend almost half of their time online viewing content. The study also found that users are spending less time on... More...

The Fault Lines of Direct Response
It’s a great time to be in online marketing. Spending is booming, old and new firms are innovating, and just about everyone is making money. But despite the good vibes and rosy analyst projections, the CPA and affiliate industry faces... More...

Popular “How To” Queries in the U.S. and U.K.
Search engines have essentially become guides for living life for many people all over the world. They might help find a Web site, or an image, or shed some light on "how to" do just about anything imaginable. Two people at Hitwise... More...

Tagged, Facebook and Bebo See Huge Growth
According to recent figures released by comScore, social networking is continuing to gain steam across the globe. Tagged, Facebook, and Bebo in particular saw significant growth from June 2006 to June 2007. More...

Disneyland Tops List of Travel Destination Search Terms
July is the month that sees the most traffic to travel related Web sites. According to recent numbers released by Hitwise, all but one of the top 10 most visited travel destinations in July was a theme park. More...

Online Video Watchers Are Viral
According to recent numbers released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, nearly one in five Americans watch online videos on any given day. Their activity does not stop with viewing, however. Many of them forward their... More...

WWE, Yahoo Take Leader Positions in June
According to the latest comScore Media Metrix numbers, the WWE Web site was the top gaining property from May to June 2007, while Yahoo! maintained its leadership position in the list of top 50 overall Web properties for June. More...

U.S. is Spam Leader in Q2 2007
The U.S. relayed the most spam during the second quarter of 2007, according to Sophos. This indicates that the U.S. is continuing its leadership position from 2006 for spam relaying. More...

U.S. Adults Have Widespread Broadband Access
According to recent numbers released by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), 72% of adults in the U.S. have access to a broadband connection, and more than half of households in the U.S. have broadband subscriptions. More...

Google Testing Mobile AdSense
Google has its enormous eye on just about every arena of life out there, and the mobile arena is definitely no exception. With about 3 billion mobile handsets in the world, according to Dilip Venkatachari, director of product... More...

Online Marketing Will Blossom in Europe
Forrester Research’s report titled "European Online Marketing Tops Eur16 Billion in 2012" expects online marketing spending in Europe to more than double its 2006 figure ($9.45 billion) by 2012 ($20.16 billion). E-mail, search... More...

Internet Population to Reach 1.5 Billion by 2011
A recent report released by JupiterResearch indicates that over the next five years the worldwide online population will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.6%, which means that by 2011 there will be 1.5 billion people... More...

CAPTCHA is Pwned
"Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart," otherwise known as CAPTCHA, seems to have been trounced by some spammers. CAPTCHA is best known as the box that features an image of a... More...

Nielsen Forsakes Page Views
Nielsen//NetRatings has decided that it is finally time to bid adieu to the longtime metric staple of page views. The aesthetically appealing and experience enhancing programming technique called Ajax is partly to blame... More...

Trusted Traffic - the next generation of traffic
At Adtech last year, a well known broker was complaining to me that since pay per click advertising came out, there really haven’t been any worthwhile new forms of driving traffic. Especially compared to the past when there were new... More...

ICANN Will Test Non-English Domain Names
By November, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will begin testing out domain names that utilize non-Latin characters. However, determining guidelines and regulations for these foreign language... More...

Firefox Continuing Its Climb
Apple’s Safari Web browser might be getting a lot of attention nowadays thanks to its presence in the hugely anticipated iPhone, but everyone knows that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers are still the... More...

Dailymotion.com: The Next YouTube?
Though YouTube has become almost synonymous with all things online video-related, there seems to be a number of video-sharing sites that see a window of opportunity. After all, with the growing utilization of online ads... More...

ICANN Has Full Plate of Issues
Even though the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) rejected the .xxx top-level domain (TLD) for the third and final time on March 30, 2007, the organization still has TLD issues to tend to, among others. More...

Blinkx Unveils Cutting Edge Ad Platform
Blinkx, the growing video search engine, recently launched an ad platform, AdHoc, that would place ads beside or in videos based on what it "hears" in them. This speech-recognition technology is the first of its kind in the video... More...

Top Web Properties in May
May was a month that included the beginning of the summer movie season, Mother's Day, and the start of major political debates. According to comScore Media Matrix this meant that May 2007 was a good one for movie information... More...

AOL Spammer Pleads Guilty
On Monday, Adam Vitale pleaded guilty in a federal court to filling the inboxes of 1.2 million AOL subscribers with spam e-mails in less than a week in August 2005, thereby violating anti-spam laws. The Brooklyn man was caught making... More...

U.K. Spends Most Time Online
A study conducted by comScore World Metrix found that Web users in the U.K. spend more time online than users from any other country in the world. Britain’s crummy weather is partially to blame. More...

Broadband Connections On The Rise
Broadband connections are expected to be more pervasive in the U.S. and across the world in the next few years. In a report titled "US Broadband Forecast, 2007 to 2012: LECs Maintain Advantage over Cable Operators in... More...

U.S. Online Ad Spend Nearly $17 Billion
According to the most recent "Internet Advertising Revenue Report" released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), U.S. online advertising spending in 2006 reached $16.9 billion, setting a new... More...

Computer Users Take More Action Against Spam
According to a recent research report released by Pew Internet & the American, 71% of e-mail users utilize filters to deal with unwanted messages before they get into their inboxes. An additional 41% use their own filters to purge their... More...

Maps Become Hot Battleground
It seems that Google and Microsoft are taking their battle to the streets. Literally. Well, Almost. More...

TV Viewing Elsewhere
It seems like most consumers are keen on the idea of watching online content on their television sets, though there are still a lot of people out there who are unaware that this is actually possible now, and the cost of such luxury is very... More...

MySpace Towers Above Other Social Networks
LeeAnn Prescott at Hitwise talks about social networking sites in April, and it appears that MySpace could be more dominant than many people think. In fact, the numbers referred to in her blog post makes Google’s dominance of... More...

Apparel Sales Top Computer Sales Online
For the first time ever, apparel sales exceeded computer sales online in 2006. According to a study titled "The State of Retailing Online 2007" conducted by the National Retail Federation’s online arm Shop.org, U.S. consumers spent... More...

All Your Base Are Belong To Porn
Good Magazine, “media for people who give a damn” according to its Web site, recently unveiled a revealing video with some revealing information about the big world of porn. More...

Second Life Growing, Big in Europe
Recent numbers released by comScore Networks indicate that Second Life experienced a 46% increase in the number of users in March 2007 compared to January 2007. More...

Nielsen//NetRatings Introduces VideoCensus
Internet media and market research firm Nielsen//NetRatings introduced its new online video measurement service, which is dubbed VideoCensus. Besides confirming Nielsen’s love of making one word out of two, this is an... More...

Online Ads Like Portals
Online ads have been good business for the big portals of the Internet, and it doesn’t seem like this will change anytime soon. The respective shares of the pie look a lot like the actual search engine rankings, which means that Google... More...

Online Video Junkies Dubbed “Streamies”
Knowledge Networks/SRI has come up with a cute name for online users who frequently stream videos and audio during their time on the Web: "streamies." Thoughts on the nickname aside, the fact that anyone has deemed this... More...

Offensive Content Pervades Blogosphere
According to ScanSafe’s monthly Global Threat Report for March 2007, up to 80% of all blogs on the Web contain offensive content, which includes adult language and porn. Six percent of all blogs host malware. More...

Online Banking Grows but Mobile Potential Sees Hurdles
The online banking population in the U.S. grew 9.5% to 44 million customers in 2006, according to comScore. However, this single-digit growth is significantly slower than the double-digit increases that were observed in 2005... More...

Asian Sites Get Most Visits Per Visitor
Data recently released by comScore Networks revealed the top worldwide Web sites in terms of visits per visitor in February 2007, and neither Google, Yahoo!, nor Microsoft were in the top three. More...

Firefox Is Popular In Europe
According to recent data released by French research firm XiTi, 24.1% of Web users in Europe browsed on a Firefox browser during the week ending March 11, 2007. This is a large jump from the week ending April 14, 2006, when... More...

Yahoo! Top Search Engine In Terms of Downtime
Google may have a stranglehold on the search market, but they can’t take anything away from Yahoo! when it comes to downtime in 2007. More...

No .xxx TLD
At the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)’s 28th International Public Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal last Friday, the possibility of a .xxx top-level domain (TLD) was shot down by the organization for the second... More...

Television Ads Do Well Online
According to recent findings released by marketing research firm Millard Brown, advertisements made for television carry over very well, if not better in some respects, online. More...

Broadband Excels Around Globe, Americans Apathetic to Internet
Broadband connections are covering the globe at a rapid speed. The growth that speedier connections are seeing is not just confined to reach, but to actual speeds as well, as countries like Japan and South Korea are seeing faster... More...

Does Small Business Rule?
In the mid 1800’s John D Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, which later became the foundation for almost the entire oil industry. He created the first real national corporation, and later, the first international corporation. There... More...

Microsoft and UC Davis Examine Search Engine Spam
Spam is a problem that has primarily been known for its unwelcome presence in e-mail inboxes across the world, but the average Web user also knows that spam is a large inconvenience to their online search experience. Microsoft... More...

Big Four Portals Dominating Online Ad Spend
Though March is dominated by predictions of possible Final Four match-ups, the big four Internet portals leave no room for uncertainty when it comes to online advertising dominance. More...

Display Ads Still More Important Than Online Video
Advertising through online video may be the hot topic these days, but that doesn’t mean that more traditional means of reaching consumers like display ads are dying off. In fact, recent numbers from Datran Media indicate that... More...

Domain Registration, Web Audience Rises
According to "The Domain Name Industry Brief, March 2007" released by VeriSign, there is now a base of 120 million registered domain names across all top-level domains (TLD). This is a 32% increase from the 2005 figure. More...

March Marketing Madness
The annual NCAA men’s college basketball tournament known affectionately as March Madness has long been based solely on the television platform for both viewers and advertisers. However, with the undeniable advent of online... More...

Facebook Trumps MySpace
A recent survey conducted by marketing firm Youth Trends shows that American youths between the ages of 17-25 like Facebook more than MySpace. More...

Niche Podvertising Medium to Reach $400M by 2011
Online video might be taking most of the online advertising buzz these days, but podcast advertising (affectionately nicknamed “podvertising”) is expected to take some of the spotlight, too. More...

Google Gains, Yahoo Loses in January
According to recent figures released by comScore Networks, Google remains the dominant king of the search engine realm. In January of 2007, it gained 0.2% from the previous month to claim 47.5% of all search queries conducted... More...

Wireless Web Users: Who Are They?
A recent study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project gives some broad demographic information about Internet users who have surfed the Web with a wireless device as opposed to users who have not. More...

Microsoft Challenges YouTube with Soapbox
In yet another catch-up attempt, Microsoft unveiled its online video upload site called Soapbox to the general public in a beta release. More...

Portland Trail Blazers Social Networking Site Launches
The Portland Trail Blazers are a very young team in the NBA, so it makes sense that the organization is trying to create a youthful appeal across all its operations, on and off the court. The team’s new social networking initiative for... More...

Yahoo, MySpace Catching Up To Google?
Starting on Monday, Yahoo! Mail Beta began giving some users the opportunity to use an integrated version of Yahoo! Messenger right from their e-mail window, similar to how users can log on and use Google Talk directly from... More...

Top Search Terms for January 2007
Earlier this week, Hitwise released their listing of the top 10 search terms for 10 categories for the month of January 2007. More...

Consumers Too Careless Online
Two separate studies released earlier this week came to the same conclusion: Web users are too casual and absentminded when it comes to their personal security online. More...

MySpace Top Term in 2006
Hitwise recently released their "Top US Search Lists of 2006." This list gives us a different perspective compared to other lists concerning what Web users were interested about last year. More...

YouTube Will Share the Wealth
In a mildly surprising statement over the weekend, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley indicated that the video sharing site would begin to share revenues produced by its videos with their creators “in the coming months.” More...

MySpace Helps Out
MySpace’s huge popularity and fame has not come without a cost. As the social networking site has swelled to enormous numbers, high-profile problems involving young users have led to complaints that the company has... More...

Online News Beats Out Newspapers in Classrooms
The Carnegie-Knight Task Force released a report on the Future of Journalism Education on Monday, which indicated that 57% of teachers use online news sources with some frequency. More...

MySpace Sues the “Spam King”
Scott Richter has been accused of being one of the world’s top three spammers and holds the auspicious moniker of the “Spam King.” He is also being used by the king of the social networking world, News Corp.’s MySpace. More...

BBC and Google Get More Comfortable
When unlicensed videos appear on a big online video site, the word "lawsuit" usually comes to mind. But in the case of the BBC and Google Video, the ending looks to be a lot happier, and a lot less legally sticky. More...

Malware and Spam Thrives in U.S. and China
According to a recent report titled "Security Threat Report 2007" released by Sophos, an IT security firm, the U.S. and China host the most sites containing malware and relay the most spam. More...

E-Mail Sites Losing Their Allure to Advertisers
New numbers released by Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance show that e-mail sites received 44.2% of online display ads in December 2006. This number shows a noticeable decline from November’s 47.5% and October’s 51.1%. More...

Personal Service and Privacy
According to a new survey called "Personalization Survey" released by ChoiceStream, it seems that consumers are warming up to the idea of exchanging personal information for an enhanced, more personal... More...

U.S. Teens Like Social Networking
New numbers from the Pew Internet & American Life Project confirm the obvious: teenagers in the U.S. love their social networking sites. And, as expected, MySpace is the overwhelmingly favored site for teens when it comes... More...

Heavy.com Gets Fifth Round of Funding
Just as Google’s dominance has failed to end the spawning of more search engines, the fairytale that is YouTube has not discouraged other video sites from pursuing greatness in their own, smaller-scale forms. More...

Online Shoppers Were Happy This Holiday Season
A consumer survey conducted by ForeSee Results and FGI Research indicates that overall, consumers who shopped online this holiday season were happy with the top 40 retailers on the Internet. More...

ComScore to Revamp Metrics for Web 2.0
Page views were once the standard by which the popularity and sway of Web sites was measured, but that is all changing now with the emergence of Web 2.0, and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript) in particular. Many sites now contain... More...

Online Holiday Spending Jumped High in 2006
For the 56 day period ending on December 26, holiday e-commerce sales reached $23.11 billion, a 26% jump from last year’s $18.28 billion figure. This is according to information released by comScore Networks. More...

Spam Grows Up in 2006, Eyes a Big 2007
MessageLabs recently released its 2006 Annual MessageLabs Intelligence Report, which discusses its analysis of the spam, virus, and phishing attacks in 2006, and looks forward to 2007. More...

YouTube Sees Sky and Big Competition on the Horizon
Sky Broadcasting, based in Britain, struck a deal recently with Google to provide its broadband users a Sky-branded package of Google’s search, advertising, communications, and video products. More...

Streaming Music is Significant to Consumers
In a report about their Net Usage Index for Digital Music, Akamai Technologies, Inc. conveyed findings concerning consumer online music habits. According to the index, global digital music Web sites receive daily... More...

AOL Goes Latino
In its latest transitional move, AOL made its Spanish language portal available to Web users at no cost. The portal, called AOL Latino, was only available to subscribers who paid up to $26 per month for the service up until Monday. More...

Social Networking Sites Faring Well
American males and females between the ages of 17 and 25 agree on one thing: Facebook is engaging. The social networking site was noted as the number one site among both groups, but was more popular among females. More...

Antispyware Company Settles for $1M
You know you’re living in a scary world when you have to watch out for spyware and antispyware companies, and that seems to be precisely the world we live in. More...

TV Suffers at the Growing Hands of Online Video
According to a study carried out by ICM, a market research company based in the U.K., and commissioned by the BCC, online video sites are taking away from the time people spend watching their television screens. Though this... More...

E-Commerce Sees Big Black Friday
According to numbers released by comScore, spending on online retail sites soared high on Black Friday this year, seeing 42% growth over last year’s post-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy. More...

Security Fears Were a Big Downer for 2006
According to the research firm Gartner, e-commerce lost almost $2 billion in 2006 thanks to security concerns that consumers feel when they shop online. About half of this figure ($913 million) was due to consumers who avoided... More...

Online Courses Growing, For Better or For Worse
Regardless of the disapproval from some academic officials, online learning is a phenomenon that is continuing to grow quickly and does not look like it will dissipate any time soon. New figures released by the College Board in... More...

Calling Dr. Google
Reports surfaced a few weeks ago indicating that Web users were relying on the Internet for answers to their medical queries and concerns. A report titled “Online Health Search 2006” was released by the Pew Internet & American Life... More...

MySpace is the Driver, All Other Sites Are Destinations
If the Internet was a bus, MySpace would be the driver, and other Web sites would be stops that users are dropped off at. This is the basic idea behind a recent report by Hitwise. The report analyzes the traffic that big sites like... More...

Online Video Ads Growing, but Will They Get Smarter?
Advertising in the realm of online videos has become a popular and important topic that has been highlighted with Google’s recent YouTube deal. There are those who foresee more clouds than sunshine in this medium’s future (Mark... More...

Zango Settles for $3 Million
Last Friday, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Zango Inc., an Internet adware company, had agreed to pay a $3 million settlement to the U.S. government in response to assertions that it had covertly installed pop-up ad... More...

MySpace Heads to Japan, Korean Portal Courting Google
According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a Japanese business newspaper, News Corp. and Japanese technology giant Softbank Corp. will participate in a 50-50 joint venture to launch MySpace Japan, which hopes to be the Godzilla to... More...

Wikipedia Gets Bad Press
Antivirus vendor Sophos published a notice last Friday indicating that malicious code was being spread by way of the German version of Wikipedia. The code was found in links to a fix on the page for the “Lovesan/MSBlast... More...

Users Look to Search Engines for Health Information
Is online health information reliable and accurate? Doctors worry about this question, but Web users in the U.S. don’t seem to mind. A recent report titled “Online Health Search 2006” released by the Pew Internet & American Life... More...

Internet-Influenced Holiday Spending Expected to Jump
If the latest survey sponsored by the National Retail Federation (NRF) is correct, consumers are planning on giving the gift of green to U.S. retailers this holiday season. The survey, conducted by BIGresearch, indicates that the... More...

Britons Blog, Make “History” on Tuesday
According to a study called “Digi:Nation” conducted by the Harris polling institute along with the Guardian newspaper’s online edition, over a quarter of Web users in Britain have created their own blogs or Web sites. This is seen... More...

Affinity Circles Goes to the NBA
The Portland Trail Blazers might not be the most advanced team in terms of on-court skill, but the organization just took a step towards being one of the more advanced teams in terms of online technology. The NBA team, which... More...

Italy and Microsoft Unite Against
On Monday, Italy became the first European nation to agree to implement an anti-child-porn system developed by Microsoft. Both Italy and Microsoft believe that the rest of the continent will soon follow suit. More...

Social Media Optimization
Two months ago Rohit Bhargava wrote an entry on his blog about the five rules his firm uses to socially optimize a site. This article is credited with pushing Social Media Optimization (SMO) to the forefront of our industry. More...

Real-time Blogging
Blogs have become a credible information source for public consumption, threatening news outlets and prompting them to hop on the bandwagon. Most media outlets, large or small, now have blogs on their sites. Unlike a print... More...

Google, YouTube Notch Deals, Make a Deal of Their Own
On Monday, Google announced two separate deals with Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music that will allow Google Video users to view music videos from both labels at no charge, thanks to Google’s ad-supported model. The... More...

Almost Two-Thirds of Online Gamers are Women
Late last week, Nielsen Entertainment released its third annual Active Gamer Benchmark Study, and the results indicated that 56% of the 117 million Active Gamers in the U.S. in 2006 played online, and that 64% of these online gamers are women. More...

CHECKING OUT THE FLYOVER: CONQUERING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
Conventional wisdom —a very fallible and flexible thing these days— maintains that culture comes out of places like Los Angeles and New York City. Since the tech boom of the 90s, those epicenters of influence have shifted to include the... More...

Future of Internet Advertising
It’s getting almost predictable, but there’s more reaffirming reports about the good health of Internet advertising. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the first six months of 2006 delivered... More...

Online Gambling Goes Bust in the U.S.
After the House of Representatives and the Senate approved the Safe Port Act on Saturday, a bill that includes the barring of U.S. banks and credit card companies from making payments to online gambling sites, the industry all... More...

Spammers Go Old School and Geeky, IM Attacks Increase
According to a recent report released by IT security firm Sophos, September was both good and bad for the battle against spam. The upside was the fact that the overall ratio of infected e-mail was at an all-time low of 0.33%, or just... More...

Microsoft’s New Umbrella
On Monday, Microsoft announced that they would be converging their various advertising products and outlets under an umbrella brand called Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions. More...

AOL Sued, Makes Organizational Changes
It was bound to happen soon, and last Friday it finally did. Three AOL subscribers filed a lawsuit and are seeking class action status in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland. More...

MySpace, Seventeen Team Up in the Name of Safety
Social networking giant MySpace is teaming up with Seventeen magazine, the National School Board Association (NSBA), and the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) to publish and distribute materials concerning... More...

Video Sharing
The uploading and sharing of video on the Internet must be a bonanza for copyright lawyers, be they in defense or prosecution of the practice. In addition to the endless supply of amateur video clips, generations of television and... More...

Social Networking Software
Is social networking software on the decline? After boasting so much success, is this seemingly lucrative software no longer on Murdock's radar? More...

YouTube Good with Warner, Bad with Universal
On Monday, online video giant YouTube announced that it had inked a deal with Warner Music Group on Sunday afternoon that would allow both parties to share the advertising revenue derived from Warner’s videos. The deal... More...

Web 2.0 Growing in Popularity in U.K.
According to a report released by comScore World Metrix, user-generated content (UGC) sites have seen rapid growth in the past year in the U.K. More...

YouTube Slaps Facebook
YouTube’s latest addition will be seen as a slap in the Facebook. This is because YouTube has added a group called “Colleges on YouTube” to its list of user Groups. The page touts the new group as a place where students can... More...

MySpace to Sell Music with Help from Snocap
MySpace will begin to sell songs this fall with the help of San Francisco-based digital licensing company Snocap, which was founded by former Napster software writer Shawn Fanning. This will be great news for unsigned bands... More...

Google and eBay Partner Up in Overseas Ads
The latest splash at the online giants’ pool party comes courtesy of Google and eBay. The two companies announced a multi-year deal on Monday that indicates a joint revenue-sharing enterprise in contextual and click-to-call ads... More...

AOL Video Now Offers Movies for Download
Last week, AOL began selling movies for download on its video portal, AOL Video. The full-length films from 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment... More...

VoIP Grew 83% in 2005
There were 10.3 million VoIP subscribers around the world at the beginning of 2005, and 18.7 million by the year’s end. This marks 83% growth for the year, according to Point-Topic, a UK-based company specializing in broadband... More...

“Web Conditioning: Get Your Site in Shape”
It’s not talked about much, but woodland animals are notoriously unresponsive to advertising. That’s why you don’t expect to see many billboards when camping. The website of a brick-and-mortar business acts... More...

Splogs Continue to be a Growing Pain
According to Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion blog, the newest issue of Wired magazine contains some in-depth discussion about splogs and how they present a challenge for search engines and the blogosphere. More...

AOL Fallout Continues
On Monday it was revealed that AOL’s chief technology officer, Maureen Govern, had resigned from her post in the aftermath of the company’s privacy mishap. The researcher who posted the data online and the researcher’s... More...

A Tale of Three Duplicities
Last issue you may recall reading "A Tale of Two Duplicities." Now you can enjoy the third and final saga in this trilogy of Internet shenanigans! More...

Big Opportunities in Online Video
Don't look now, but there are 1,300+ Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) channels available free of charge on the Internet. And to think that back in the 1980s some thought cable TV was content overload, with its forty some-odd channels More...

Outlook for Web 2.0 Sites is Del.icio.us
According to a Hitwise blog post last week, Web traffic to del.icio.us has more than doubled since the social bookmarking site was purchased by Yahoo in December of 2005. More...

Mobile Internet Population Swells to 34.6 Million
Telephia released a report on Monday called the "U.S. Device Consensus Report for Q2 2006." It indicates that in June of 2006 in excess of 34.6 million consumers browsed the Internet with their mobile devices. More...

Apple Adopts A Leopard Program
Steve Jobs is one of the premier names in computing. Almost no one else in the business world, perhaps Warren Buffet or Alan Greenspan, have demonstrated Jobs’ EF Hutton-like ability to freeze a room … no, freeze an... More...

AOL Jumps to the Front of the Online Storage Line
Private search query data isn’t the only thing AOL plans on giving away for free. In September, AOL will offer 5GB of free online storage to any user with an AOL or AIM screen... More...

Google Talk Upgraded
It is a well-known fact that Google Talk has been just another of Google’s product offerings that has not been able to find a faithful following. According to comScore, Google Talk has been installed 976,000 times, but in June it only... More...

Eons.com Targets Social Networking at 50+ Crowd
Founder of Monster.com, Jeff Taylor, unveiled his latest project: Eons.com, a social networking site aimed at Web users aged 50 and over. More...

CNN Exchange Relies on User-Created Content
On Monday, CNN unveiled its answer to video-sharing and citizen journalism sites in the form of CNN Exchange, a page on CNN.com that opens up article, video, and picture aggregation to users of the popular site. More...

Broadband Increases Reach
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission released a report that showed big growth for broadband subscriptions in 2005. At the beginning of 2005, there were 37.9 million broadband enabled homes in the U.S. That... More...

Insane in the Domain
Here are some things about domain names that I didn’t know that were mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article this week featuring a “domainologist”: 1) There are roughly 47 million registered “.coms.” 2) The letter “a” when used More...

Bet On Conviction
Another trusted officer of a publicly traded company was arrested this week, nabbed in Texas while changing planes. No, he isn’t from Enron or WorldCom and is not accused of cooking the books or embezzlement. In fact, until his... More...

Mozilla Will Immortalize Evangelical Users
Dedicated users of the Firefox Web browser will have a shot at being written into the very source code of the next version of the browser, Firefox 2.0. In observance of the Mozilla Foundation’s three-year anniversary, on July 15 the... More...

Microsoft and Yahoo Open Up to Each Other
Numbers two and three in the instant messaging realm have finally made visible steps towards an alliance that they announced back in October. In what would appear to be a viable threat to AOL’s number one AIM, Microsoft’s... More...

Health Search Engines Wanted
According to JupiterResearch, 71% of online consumers run queries through search engines in order to find answers to health-related questions, but only 16% of them find the information they want. This seems to indicate that there... More...

Topix, ShopLocal Offer Local Online Ads
Local news aggregator, Topix.net, and ShopLocal.com have teamed up to offer a way for big and small brands to advertise to specific localities online using a ZIP code-based system... More...

Newspapers Can Thrive Online
Numbers alone might lead one to think that the end of days is almost here for newspapers, but there’s also my personal observation, too. I could go a week without reading a newspaper or seeing one lying around the offices of... More...

Publishers Clearing House Obtains Blingo
In a logical marriage of complements, sweepstakes and direct marketing giant Publishers Clearing House (PCH) announced its acquisition of Blingo, Inc., the hybrid offspring of a Google-powered search engine... More...

Gmail Slightly Enhanced
Deleting all of the spam that accumulates in your Gmail “Spam” folder has always been a bit of a hassle. Users of the Google e-mail service would have to “Select All,” and then click the “Delete Forever” button. Just recently, Google... More...

Online Ad Spend to Reach 7% of Global by 2008
ZenithOptimedia, a media services agency, recently modified its estimate of the portion of the global ad spend that would be held by the Internet by 2008. In April the agency estimated that the Internet would make up 6.5% of global ad... More...

Image-Based Spam Makes a Comeback
Up until recently, image-based spam was all-but defeated. Anti-spam filters figured out how to detect those messages by utilizing mathematical formulas and unique signatures that software used to flag them, but with new... More...

World Cup Gaining Popularity Online
America has always been reluctant to embrace the world of soccer, but recent findings by Nielsen//NetRatings seem to indicate a possible change in this trend. The official World Cup site, FIFAWorldcup.com, saw 149% growth in... More...

Microsoft, Poker Top Nielsen//NetRatings List
After obtaining the results from the sampling activity through its MegaPanel of Web users at work and at home, Nielsen//NetRatings has released its findings for the top parent companies and stickiest brands in the U.S. for the... More...

3G: Behold the Next Generation
Ten years from now you’ll reminisce about the days before wireless high-speed Internet, that dark era when you were tethered to a cabled modem and computer when checking messages. Like life before the cell phone, how did... More...

Big Brands Securing .mobi Domain Names
There’s a new top-level domain in town, and its name is Dotmobi. The name is a moniker for mLTD, which stands for mobile Top Level Domain, Ltd. It was appointed to be the authorized worldwide registry for the .mobi domain by the... More...

MySpace Implements Safety Measures
Safety for young users of MySpace has always been a concern for parents and safety experts, but the issue was thrusted even further into the limelight when the mother of a Texas teenager, who claims she was raped by a man she met... More...

Search Marketers Are Getting Smarter
New findings released by DoubleClick’s Performics indicate that search marketers are becoming more adept at handling fluctuating marketing conditions and are running more effective campaigns... More...

Invest Wisely in a Business Geek
Business is like a game of poker—a few careless moves will have you trading in your designer clothes for a barrel with suspenders. New business ventures, particularly Internet ones, present thrilling opportunities; we come... More...

Those Smashing Mash-Ups
The world heeds me not when I extol the virtues of convergence. “Con-what?” It’s the coming together of technologies, don’t you know, the new wave of…And I’ll stop right there. There’s better terminology for convergence as we tangibly... More...

Spam Eats Up One Hour Per Day
According to a “Spam Personality” survey conducted in May by Reflexion Network Solutions, a typical employee spends up to an hour per day deleting spam e-mails. This translates into about 12.5% of lost work time for someone... More...

Sony BMG Strengthens Online Video Offerings
On Monday, Brightcove announced that Sony BMG Music Entertainment will be utilizing its broadband technology to further its Web music video arm.Sony BMG has already launched an ad-supported music video site called... More...

Google’s Voice Recognition Possibilities
Using hands and fingers to carry out various tasks is becoming more and more tiresome for many consumers around the world. As technology has advanced, so have expectations and desires for further levels of convenience... More...

Shout it: Save Our Net Neutrality!
Working in online advertising has familiarized me with some of the larger issues that affect our industry and, ultimately, the way we use the Internet. Not the least of which is the subject of net neutrality that’s been in the news... More...

Eyes Wide on the Internet
How could I get tired of advertising seminars or conferences? Not only can I count on scoring enough pens, pads, and doo-dads to last me until the next one, but I usually end up learning my field of work, too. The Eyes on the... More...

Record Number of IM Attacks in May
Postini, a company that provides Integrated Message Management technology and services, announced last week that the month of May saw the most corporate Instant Messaging (IM) attacks ever. Corporate IM traffic increased... More...

Mpire Looks to Enhance Online Shopping Experience
Mpire.com is being spearheaded by CEO Matt Hulett, the former president of Expedia. The new online shopping site allows users to search for items on eBay, Yahoo!, Overstock, and Craigslist all on one site. Search results can be... More...

EBay Testing Contextual Ads
At its annual Developers Conference in Las Vegas eBay announced that it will begin beta testing a new contextual advertisement system that will place contextual ads for eBay auctions on their affiliates’ sites in exchange for a... More...

General Motors as David: Slaying Goliath’s Smear
It’s something the Public Relations Team at ICMediaDirect.com continually stresses to clients - a company must avail itself to corporate blogging. The interactive world saw the wisdom of this advice on Thursday, June 1st, when... More...

Facebook: $750 Mil in Hand Worth More than $2 Bil in Sky
It came up conversationally, but I believe I’m the only person at my company to have firsthand experience as a user of Facebook.com. It was kind of funny to have all these online advertising professionals asking me... More...

Online Advertising Revenue Continues Growth
According to the most recent report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, Internet ad revenue climbed to $3.864 billion for the first quarter of 2006. This is a 38% increase from last year’s first... More...

TicketsNow and StubHub Cleaning up Ticket Resale
Ticket scalping has been a practice that was never highly regarded and involved many risks for buyers. However, the Internet may play a major role in altering the face of ticket reselling. Two sites offer answers to the problems... More...

Google Checkout Foreshadowing Battle with PayPal?
Back in February there were murmurs about something called GBuy, which was supposed to be Google’s response to PayPal. Jeff Jordan, the president of eBay’s PayPal unit, said that “It's a very legitimate competitive threat. It's... More...

Are you Blogging Effectively?
Perhaps “blogging” isn’t such a graceful word. To me, it’s a heavy sounding word that suggests a drudgery in the way that cereals can be soggy and minds groggy. But it’s too late to rename this shortened word for web-logging... More...

Pepsi, Motorola, and Yahoo! to Offer Video Ringtones
Yahoo! has always had a strong desire to offer its users an increasing amount of unique content, and they seem to have found a niche that has been virtually untapped thus far. The trio of Pepsi, Motorola, and Yahoo! Music will soon offer... More...

Hardware Makers Against Net Neutrality Laws
Software and Internet firms have voiced their strong desire to see legislation regarding the issue of Net neutrality, but this has not changed what hardware makers think about the matter. Last week, a group of major hardware makers... More...

Television Commercials Moving to the Web
Up until recently, the basic 30-second commercial spot on television was viewed as the no-brainer knock-out punch. It was the most obvious way to make the biggest splash in the minds and behaviors of consumers. In some... More...

Facebook Becoming More Mobile
Just weeks after expanding their mostly college-focused age group to include corporate groups, Facebook recently announced plans to launch a feature that will enable users to view the site on their phones similar to the way they can... More...

Social Networking Sites on a Roll
Data released by Nielsen//NetRatings on Thursday have confirmed what everyone already knew: social networking sites are continuing their rampage through the Internet and all its users... More...

24/7 Real Media Sees Rising Revenues
24/7 Real Media, Inc., surprised analysts by beating their estimates with $41.7 million in revenues for the first quarter of 2006. The company did have a GAAP net loss of $0.16 per share, compared to a GAAP net loss of $0.01 per share in... More...

ABC Unveils Full Streaming Episodes for Free
Last month, ABC announced that they would be offering streaming full episodes of four of its most popular shows as part of its two-month trial. The trial began on Monday, May 1, and will offer users streaming episodes of... More...

Google Fears IE7
A story in the New York Times on Monday indicated that Google was talking to the U.S. Justice Department and the European Commission about Microsoft’s beta version of Internet Explorer 7. According to Google representatives, the... More...

Fox Gets More Web 2.0
Using some of their $2 billion in acquisition resources, News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media (FIM) segment purchased two relatively new Web 2.0 companies named Newroo and kSolo.com. Both sites focus on user-generated... More...

Microsoft to Enter Social Networking with Wallop
Microsoft began spreading the word about its social networking venture, Wallop, in late 2003, but has since been very quiet about its dealings with the project. After some renewed buzz about Wallop in recent weeks, Microsoft... More...

Web 2.0, Build On It
In 1999,our company opened up shop as an online advertising agency and we viewed our chosen milieu, the Internet, as a limitless possibility - there was no talk of bubbles, no clouds on the horizon. In fact, conversations in the... More...

Streaming Video and Music to Achieve $27B by 2011
According to a report released by Insight Research, streaming video and music seen and heard through the Internet and mobile gadgets will reach $27 billion in revenue by the year 2011. And this is what Insight president Robert... More...

Return Path Introduces Sender Score Reputation
Last week, Return Path introduced its Sender Score Reputation Monitoring service, which is its response to Goodmail and Vanquish’s proposed solutions to unsolicited e-mail. The Sender Score Reputation Monitor will... More...

Users Only Willing to Give Three Pages of Their Time
Jupiter Research and iProspect conducted a survey involving 2,369 participants from an online consumer panel in the U.S. to study search-related behavior. To no one’s surprise, the study concluded that most search engine... More...

8bestsites.com - Robbing Peter to pay Paul
More often than not, the topics for publication come together at the last minute. Occasionally, the topic might exist beforehand, although that still doesn’t guarantee it being written before the last minute. This week’s topic falls under... More...

Is Click-to-Call what Local Search Has Been Waiting For?
Click-to-call is an emerging contextual advertising format that will help spark the growth of localized search. It links online users to offline advertisers by combining Internet telephone capabilities. Although it has yet to hit its stride... More...

Free Wi-Fi Blessings for that City by the Bay
Last week the city of San Francisco accepted a joint bid from Google and Earthlink to bring universal wireless access, or “Wi-Fi” to that city by the bay. Residents will be able to log in wirelessly to the Internet from home, work... More...

Google and EarthLink to Unwire San Francisco
Last week, the city of San Francisco reviewed six final proposals for building a wireless network across the entire city. In the end, they chose Google and EarthLink’s concept. The team will begin discussions with San Francisco... More...

Sites Selling Phone Data Under Scrutiny
The Energy and Commerce Committee is issuing subpoenas to a dozen companies that sell confidential consumer phone data online after they refused to comply with the U.S. House of Representatives’ request for... More...

Some Adwords Basics for Beginners
Google’s Adwords is still the yardstick by which other search advertising platforms measure themselves. This isn’t merely an industry observation, but a respectful sentiment that I share... More...

Bertelsmann Eyeing Online Networking Scene
Bertelsmann, the fourth largest media corporation in the world, thinks that it’s about time to use the Internet as a tool to further connect their older club members. Currently, the German media giant has its own Direct Group of... More...

Claria Unveils PersonalWeb
On Monday, Claria (formerly known as the adware company Gator) released the beta version of its PersonalWeb, which will be an Internet tracking application that uses behavioral targeting to deliver relevant ads and content to... More...

212 Newsmaker Night with John Battelle: Author of The Search
I’m looking at John Battelle’s words that I jotted onto my notepad: “ephemeral to the eternal”. He was describing the permanent trace we leave behind as Internet users - how our immediate needs or curious whims are logged.. More...

Google Wi-Fi Ads Patent in the Works
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a patent application filed by three of Google’s employees back in September of 2004. Google engineers Wesley Chan, Shioupyn Shen, and Georges Harik are trying to get a patent on... More...

WAA Takes Aim at Spyware
Late last week, the Web Analytics Association (WAA) released a “statement of principles” in hopes of clearly differentiating spyware and cookies that are used by Web analytics applications. Though the difference between the two is... More...

V for Vanquishing Spam
Yahoo! and AOL’s plan for teaming with Goodmail to offer a certified e-mail service has not been the most well-received news of the year. Nonprofit groups and small businesses in particular have voiced their disdain for these... More...

Hey, It’s Your Domain, Your Future
Establishing your business or organization online is critical to business planning. And a good starting point is to establish your own domain name. Since the registration process is a snap and its benefits undeniable, there’s... More...

Ad Pepper Acquires Crystal Contextual Ad Technology
On March 16, Ad Pepper Media acquired contextual targeting technology provider Crystal Reference Systems for cash and stock worth up to $3.5 million. More...

Google and Nike Team to Launch Joga
Up until now, Google’s one obvious weakness was the absence of a strong social network in their arsenal. Though they do have Orkut, a community site that is invite-only, it has done poorly in any country not named Brazil. However... More...

Datran Reaches $1.1M Settlement
After a six-month investigation by the New York State Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, Datran Media was required to pay $1.1 million in penalties, disgorgements, and costs. The New York City-based company is a marketing... More...

Google’s Growing Online OS
Could Google be planning an online operating system? Despite their denials just about a year ago, recent moves and rumors seem to confirm these notions. This past week Google acquired Upstartle, a small startup that offers... More...

MySpace Messenger Coming Soon?
Peter Cashmore, an entrepreneur and consultant who writes about Internet startups on his Mashable blog, recently said this: “I pointed out that when MySpace users aren’t on MySpace, they’re checking their email or chatting on... More...

As Search Engines Grow Smarter, Will You?
As search gets smarter, tricks get cheaper and we get nearer to coming full circle to an original goal of Internet search: that content is, indeed, king. It cuts across the grain of some notions we’ve held in the industry for some time, that... More...

AIM Now Open
On Monday, AOL announced that it would make its popular instant messenger service open to software and service developers, who will now be able to create new and customized versions of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). AOL will... More...

Nielsen//NetRatings: Search is Fine
Contrary to earlier reports by comScore Media Matrix, Nielsen//NetRatings indicated that search volume actually increased 39% in January compared to the prior year. ComScore’s findings indicated that search grew at just 11%... More...

SES NYC(Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo): A Bustling Conglomeration
Coursing through the carpeted hallways of the Hilton NYC convention center, thousands of people from every demographic were either entering or exiting the various lecture halls. This was not to say that the traffic at the booths was... More...

Goodmail Brings Opposites Together
Liberal MoveOn.org and conservative RightMarch.com are both political action committees. They usually find themselves pitted against each other on many issues of interest, but on the issue of Goodmail they find that they finally have... More...

Search is Losing Steam
As users become more familiar with their favorite sites, it logically follows that they will have less and less use for a search engine. In fact, comScore’s 4th quarter 2005 survey found that it was the first quarter since this data has been... More...

"Starbucks-China" Blend: A Slam Dunk Grande
Admittedly, there are few genuine “can’t miss” propositions. But I’ve got one for you, Starbucks in China. Giant corporations being granted carte blanche in a totalitarian environment are reminiscent of an age when kings granted... More...

MySpace Going Mobile
MySpace is a hugely popular social networking site for teens and young adults in their twenties, which is also a very lucrative demographic for wireless phone companies. This common denominator clearly indicates why MySpace has... More...

New Report Forecasts $23.5B for Digital Ads by 2010
Analyst firm Parks Associates released a new report indicating that there will be growth in digital media segments with new categories such as in-game and mobile advertising to offer the highest gains. More...

Be Your Own Network
It was the mid 1990’s and, being a fresh college graduate, I was talking shop with friends in the middle of the night in a half empty bar. The stranger beside us let us know that he was an executive from CBS, even though no one had More...

Make it like Google!
Web designers - what a difficult job. Having to listen to marketers, systems, and business development folk harp on about what they want a page to look and ‘feel’ like. More...

WOM marketing
I’ve read a lot of articles lately on Word-Of-Mouth marketing. In fact, on Valentine’s Day there was an article in Media Post’s Online Media Daily that spoke about the company BzzAgent, who sells access to a “hive of More...

AOL and Yahoo! To Test Fee-Based E-mail Service
America Online and Yahoo have partnered with Mountain View, California-based Goodmail Systems to offer a certified e-mail service for businesses. It would allow businesses to send emails to members and be guaranteed of... More...

Amazon Eyeing Contextual Ad Market
Amazon has approached hand-picked sites with a beta test of its contextual ad program. This will put them in competition with Google and Yahoo!, not to mention the tardy MSN in the future... More...

Corporate Blogging For Quality Relationships
The struggle for customer share is as intense as ever, and companies need to shore up their corporate message in anyway they can. Corporate weblogs, or “blogs”, are a great, cost-effective way to engage customers, fellow... More...

Web 2.0: For the User, By the User
I still remember the thrill of my father bringing home our first VCR. The features were dizzying - would it really record television shows in the middle of the night when we were fast asleep? Finally, just what we needed! Or did... More...

Buying versus Renting
iTunes changed the music landscape by allowing a user to buy a song for $.99, instead of having to buy an entire CD (record, 8 track, cassette) as in the past. A new model has emerged, but has yet to catch on. This is buying the... More...

Email - Then and Now
Six years ago, I was sitting in a hallway in a makeshift cube, trying to wrap my head around the business of Internet advertising. I joined this space the way many people do, as a media buyer. As I was “buying” on a CPC basis in a... More...

Vloggers: Be Your Own Scorsese
From tiny acorns grow mighty oaks. Like weblogs (blogs) before them, video blogs (vlogs) are emerging from a tightly knit online community and entering into a more mainstream Internet fare. Our consulting team at More...

Mortgage Information is Money Power
You’ve heard the saying, “Information is Power”. But have you heard the one that goes like this…”Not having the right mortgage information to match your particular circumstances can wind up costing you tens of thousands of... More...

Online Retail Sales: Online Loyalty Equals Retail Gold
As an employee of an online advertising agency, I’ve got a sweet vantage for observing the latest online retail numbers tumble in - and they’re spectacular. Third Quarter online retail sales were up almost 27% from the same period... More...

Chasing the Search Tail
Although popular search words garner all the attention and adoration in the news, they only make up about 50% of all searches, according to Google estimates. The other 50% is made up of unique searches using specific... More...

Marketing Budgets Shifting From Above to Below-the-Line
A new study conducted by Winterberry Group indicates that marketing efforts are shifting from above-the-line (ATL) to below-the-line (BTL) efforts. In other words, marketing campaigns are moving away from... More...

Search and Online Ad Spending Increased in 4Q05
A survey of 60 media executives conducted by Deutsche Bank indicated that 65% of the respondents said that paid search spending increased during the last quarter, which spanned from October to December 2005, compared to the third quarter of last... More...

Microsoft Reveals adLab in Beijing, Video Hyperlink Ads
Microsoft recently opened an advertising laboratory called adLab in Beijing, China, where it has reportedly hired 50 researchers to work on about 40 different technologies that will facilitate advertising through video, television... More...

Record Number of Music Downloaded During Holidays
During the holiday week starting on Christmas Day and ending on New Year’s Day a record 20 million songs were downloaded, according to Nielsen SoundScan and E-Commerce Times. This number is more than twice the record amount of 9.5 million songs downloaded the... More...

Diigo: Another Del.icio.us?
Diigo (pronounced “deego”) is a brand new social annotation site. Social annotation is “a superset of social bookmarking,” the site (www.diigo.com) says. It is similar to del.icio.us in that it is a social bookmarking tool, and even uses the del.icio.us API... More...

User-Influenced Social Networks in 2006
Social networks have grown in prominence in 2005, and have found a powerful ally and supporter in Yahoo!. The Internet giant began this focus by acquiring the social photo sharing and tagging site Flickr, and followed up by later purchasing the social... More...

Splogs Threaten Blog Appeal
Spam is quickly rearing its ugly head in the blogosphere, and it could very well turn off people who currently enjoy the value of browsing through blogs. Despite the fact that approximately 800,000 blogs are created each day, according to new... More...

Google Box Looms at the Door
There has been buzz about a Google cube, box, or PC soon to debut, and reports seem to indicate that this may be confirmed as soon as this Friday, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Google co-founder Larry Page will make a keynote... More...

Three Important Marketing Technologies in 2005
As technology continues to be an important tool for online marketing it comes as no surprise that 2005 was an active year for affiliate marketers. Whether there were new challenges, improvements, or opportunities, 2005 brought about many interesting events and... More...

Online advertising to grow 10% annually through 2010
JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia Corp., forecasts that online display and search advertising spending will grow at an average annual rate of 10% between 2005 and 2010. The automotive and travel industries are projected to show the strongest... More...

News Highlights of 2005
News concerning products, services, and events that are changing the face of online marketing were riddled all across news headlines in 2005. To the surprise of no one, Google was part of many of them, but not all... More...

Telecommute - NY Transit Strike
On Tuesday, December 20th a key component of New York City’s infrastructure gave out in the way of a massive transit worker strike and left most of ICMediaDirect.com’s staff stranded along with millions of others in Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island and... More...

Yahoo! Teams With Movable Type
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo! has teamed with Six Apart, creator of Movable Type, the most popular software used to generate professional blogs. The announcement made on Sunday asserted that Yahoo! is now the preferred supplier of Movable Type for... More...

MTV Gets the URGE to Team With Microsoft
On Tuesday, MTV Networks announced that it had partnered with Microsoft to develop an online music service that will be called URGE. It will be integrated into the next version of the Windows Media Player, and will be launched in 2006. A statement... More...

Microsoft and MCI Join the VoIP Fray
Microsoft’s MSN and MCI announced on Monday that they have teamed up to form a global computer-to-phone service. Users will be able to make calls for as little as 2.3 cents per minute, which is lower than the best MCI rate... More...

AT&T, Bell South Unveil Revamped Yellowpages.com
Last year, BellSouth and SBC Communications, now part of AT&T, partnered to purchase Yellowpages.com and join their respective telephone directory services in order to further this online service. On December 1st, BellSouth Corp. and AT&T Inc. officially... More...

Microsoft, Time Warner Reportedly Close To Deal
The Wall Street Journal reported early on Tuesday morning that Microsoft and Time Warner were close to a deal that would form an online search and advertising partnership between the two companies. The deal would put the collaboration in contention with Google... More...

A Tale of Two Ad:Techs -- NY and Shanghai
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, The Matrix of ancient Greece, suggests that the totality of our perceptions conspire to divert us from larger truths, and my experience at ad:tech New York would support this argument. Garish memories of catchy doo-dads... More...

Broadband Video Ad Spending to Triple by 2007
Online video advertising spending in the US will nearly triple to $640 million in 2007, surging way past this year’s $225 million mark, according to a report by market research firm, eMarketer. By 2009, video ad spending is expected to reach... More...

Online Ad Revenues Soar To $3.1 billion
Online ad revenues for the third quarter of 2005 rose to a record-setting $3.1 billion. This is a 4.7% increase from the second quarter’s $2.9 billion, and a 33.9% increase over the $2.3 billion in online ad revenues for the third quarter of last year... More...

New Orleans to Get Free Wi-Fi
On Tuesday, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin revealed the city’s plan to offer a free, city-run Wi-Fi system that will be available to the entire city within a year. It has already begun operating in the city’s French Quarter, New Orleans’ central business district. More...

Google Possibly Courting Riya
There is speculation on the Web that Google is in talks with recently-launched Silicon Valley company Riya to acquire the company for about $40 million. Riya is a Redwood City, California-based startup that allows people to search their digital photos... More...

Match.com and Yahoo! Have Dates in Court
Earlier this month, on November 10th, a racketeering lawsuit was filed against Match.com, a popular online dating service. Match.com, a division of IAC/Interactive, is being accused of trying to lure customers into renewing their subscriptions... More...

Mountain View Accepts Google’s Free Wi-Fi Internet Proposal
The Mountain View City Council on Tuesday night gave Google the green light to begin building a wireless network in their city, in which the search giant is based. The City Council unanimously ratified a five-year property lease required for the construction... More...

Shanghai Surprise
The last time I was here was about 15 years ago. I vividly recall opening the curtains in my hotel room and seeing a sea of people dressed in black on bicycles with the occasional Mercedes Benz rolling by. More...

Friendster Seeking New Friends, With Little Success
In the midst of its decline, online social network Friendster has made attempts to increase its waning popularity through methods that have not been received well by some. Friendster said that the company recently kicked off a “reminder” promotion... More...