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Microsoft demos in-game advertising

Microsoft showed off its Massive advertising platform in Times Square in New York on Tuesday.

The tech giant wanted to show the advertising world, which is gathered in New York for the annual Advertising Week conference, exactly how the dynamic in-game advertisements work.

Flashing high above 43rd Street were clips from a series of games that showed avatars stopping to view a movie trailer for the Hollywood blockbuster 300. A Toyota advertisement also lined the outfield wall in a baseball game that's played on Microsoft's Xbox game console.

"The idea is to have advertisements appear and fit … Read more

Google Gadget Ads: next small thing or next big hype for advertisers?

With widgets hailed as the "next small thing" for advertising, and newspapers going "widget-happy", it was about time Google expanded the beta release of its new Google Gadget Ads to advertisers worldwide. Google Gadget Ads are interactive ads that contain rich media capabilities. They can contain data feeds, images and videos, plus they can be developed in Flash and HTML. The Gadget Ads will run on Google's content network, and the pricing model will be both cost-per-click and cost-per-impression.

John Battelle, author of the seminal book on "search," welcomes Google's embracing of … Read more

PubMatic gets ad networks to fight for you

Run a Web site or blog and don't know which of the several advertising networks to use? Just use Google AdSense and call it a day. No, wait, that's not right. PubMatic has an alternate idea: Get competing ad networks (Google, Yahoo, ValueClick, Komli, and BlueLithium for now; more to come) to bid for your site's eyeballs.

PubMatic has a clever model that brokers your site's traffic to the various networks, and swaps out their ad modules depending on which one pays better. The service also continuously modifies the layout of ad modules and tries to … Read more

MySpace plays advertising matchmaker

So your MySpace.com profile says you got a dog named Fido.

Next thing you know, here come the doggie ads--Bones for Bowser, Flea dip designed for Flopper, and the Ultimate Pooper-Scooper.

Executives at Fox Interactive Media, which oversee MySpace for owner News Corp., apparently are hot to trot on this trail and will be on the talk tour this week to discuss the results of their personal profile-advertising matching program, according to a report in The New York Times.

So, what this means for you and Fido is you'll have another name of a flea dip vendor for … Read more

Changing with 'The Times'

I grew up with The New York Times and still believe that for all its faults, real or imagined, this remains the best general interest daily newspaper published in the United States--in print and online.

When you're that visible, everyone's got an opinion. So it is that The Times gets it from the left, from the right and from the whack jobs who inhabit that bizarre netherworld beyond both extremes.

But anyone who thinks sensibly about the intersection of media and the Internet has to agree that The Times made the right decision when it announced today the end of the TimesSelect subscription service. … Read more

AOL packs its bags for Manhattan, with emphasis on ads

Looks like the "A" in AOL actually stands for "Advertising." The once-mighty online media company has announced a shakeup that will place ad revenue squarely in its corporate crosshairs, grouping its advertising properties--Advertising.com, as well as the recent acquisitions of Tacoda, Adtech, Third Screen Media and Lightningcast--into a new entity that it calls "Platform A."

Former Tacoda CEO Curtis Viebranz has been appointed executive vice president and president of Platform A, and a statement from AOL asserts that this is "the final stage in AOL's transition from an access business … Read more

Mortgage crisis to hurt online ads, say analysts

Several analysts are predicting that the mortgage crisis in the U.S. will ripple through to the online advertising market. One of the most popular types of online ads happens to be for mortgages. So the theory goes that if lenders have to cut their ad budgets, Google, Yahoo and other news sites and blogs will be pinched too.

In a research note on Friday, Sandeep Aggarwal of Oppenheimer & Co. spells it out: "Internet advertising is not immune to any potential cutbacks in ad budgets."

The firm trimmed its financial estimates for Google, Yahoo and Bankrate last … Read more

Revver shares $1 million with videographers

Revver, a video-sharing site trudging along in YouTube's shadow, announced Wednesday that the company paid $1 million to videographers over the past year.

Los Angeles-based Revver, among the first Web sites to share advertising revenue with video creators, paid the money to 25,000 people, the company said in a press release.

Because Revver splits ad money with creators, 50-50, Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch figured that the company makes around $2 million to $2.5 million from advertisers.

He also suggested that the figure could be lower if Revver pays more to high-end video makers.

A kid's-eye view of laptop design

A group of kids from one of our local elementary schools has formed a "mini-laptop club." They don't use electronic machines. Instead, these first-, second- and third-graders draw their own laptops on construction paper and pretend to e-mail each other. They dedicate a surprising amount of time to this activity. I once had a chance to examine one of their "keyboards." I was fascinated to learn which Internet functions had sunk into the minds of these kids, who are just getting their first exposure to computers from watching their parents work, and from using kid-friendly sites. Follow the page jump to see one of their designs.… Read more

Grades for sale at Naples High

Do you remember school fund raise drives? Perhaps you recall being a child having to sell boxes of chocolate, or maybe you recently ran into a young fund raiser outside the supermarket with candy for his band or choir. Then again you might even have the halfway-depleted box your son or daughter couldn't sell last week. I remember being saved from fund raiser hell on more than one occasion, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one. In a twist on this common theme, a high school journalism class at Naples High School has been tasked to sell advertising in their school's yearbook and their grade depends on it.

According to NBC2, the students must sell $600 in ads to receive an A, $500 for a B, $400 for a C, $300 for a D, and students who are unable to sell at least $300 in advertising for the school yearbook will receive an F. While it's certainly true that advertising is an essential component for almost any news organization, it is typically not the role of journalists to solicit these dollars. In fact, there is usually a wall between the advertising staff and the news staff to prevent conflicts of interest when an advertiser ends up in the news.