advertising

A German company is launching on Monday a new content delivery network that will serve up related articles and ads that are contextually relevant to whatever is on the Web site being viewed.

Proximic, which has offices in Munich and Palo Alto, Calif., is offering a way for Web site publishers to display related information from other sources and ads, as well as to syndicate their content to other sites.

Rather than requiring advertisers to buy ads based on keywords or categories, the system automatically reads and matches relevant content according to "interconnected patterns" in the documents that &… Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, 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.