Advertising and marketing

Federal antitrust regulators have clearly laid out their concerns to Yahoo and Google regarding their controversial search advertising agreement, but discussions of potential remedies have yet to come up, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

Antitrust regulators with the Department of Justice have largely narrowed their concerns into two buckets, one centering on the potential affect on advertising pricing in the short run and to what extent there would be a negative impact on the industry, and the second being will the agreement eventually lead to Yahoo exiting the search advertising business altogether, the source noted.

Currently, the … Read more

As part of Advertising Week in New York, AOL's Platform-A ad service has unveiled BidPlace, an ad exchange that will launch in the first half of next year.

In an ad exchange, advertisers place bids on pieces of inventory, and the highest bidder wins. It's the premise behind companies such as Right Media, which Yahoo acquired in 2007 after initially investing in it.

BidPlace will let advertisers bid on AOL sites, its partner sites, and third-party sites that use Platform-A's ad network. AOL says Platform-A's network reaches 90 percent of online audiences, according to ComScore statistics.… Read more

Hulu announced Tuesday that it now has more than 900 series and movie titles in its library from over 100 content providers. So in conjunction, the video hub--started as a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.--has done some cleanup work.

Hulu now has a "Channels" option where you can sort through its programming by genre, from "comedy" to "reality" to "anime." The site is working to beef up the latter in order to attract Japanese animation's millions of Web-savvy fans. There's also a "Web Originals" … Read more

Google came out swinging this week in defense of its controversial search advertising agreement with Yahoo.

The Internet search giant posted an FAQ on its proposed partnership and its affect on advertising prices on its public policy blog Thursday and followed it up with another posting Friday on its potential effect on competition.

In both cases, Google makes the argument that the deal would not harm competition nor lead to increased advertising prices.

But the blog postings were only part of its busy week. On Wednesday, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told reporters during a press conference that the company … Read more

It's a familiar pattern: another month, another increase in Google's search market share.

Internet users performed 11.7 billion searches in the U.S. in August, choosing Google 63 percent of the time, according to ComScore's monthly analysis released Thursday. That's an increase of 1.1 percentage points from 61.9 percent in July, the analyst firm said.

Yahoo slipped from 20.5 percent to 19.6 percent, and Microsoft slipped from 8.9 percent to 8.3 percent.

Google's brand name value jumped from 20th place last year to 10th in 2008, according to the latest version of an annual study that ranks the best brands, with only four technology companies ahead of it on the list.

Microsoft slipped from second to third place, edged down a peg by IBM, according to the study by BusinessWeek and Interbrand, which base their results on the value of the brand as judged by how much revenue it will likely earn for the company.

Google showed the strongest gain, with a value that increased 43 percent to $25.6 billion, … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The national and global economy is suffering something between a setback and a meltdown, but Google's top executives said Wednesday they're bullish about Silicon Valley's economic prospects.

"This is the sixth or seventh cycle I've seen in Silicon Valley. I think we're better positioned than ever," Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said of the Silicon Valley region during a meeting with reporters at the company's headquarters here.

Schmidt specifically said the venture capital community is more sophisticated and that a Northern California start-up can reach scale more easily. "Young … Read more

Yahoo has begun offering some users a more personalized home page that the company hopes will increase the usage and utility of a Web site that's widely used but elderly in Internet years.

The new home page features a dashboard on the left edge that reports activity with a variety of applications. For example, it can be set so users see e-mail from Yahoo Mail, AOL, and Gmail, and other applications notify users of comment on photos posted at Flickr, events on the calendar, and bids active on eBay.

The new page will be revamped later with more dramatic … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Despite increasing scrutiny from regulators, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt showed no signs of being deterred from its plan to put into effect its search-ad deal with Yahoo less than a month from now.

"Time is money in our business," Schmidt said in a meeting with reporters at company headquarters here, and in the absence of an opinion from regulators, the company plans to go ahead with the deal. "We do not know their position," whether it's a great deal, a poor deal, or whether regulators will want changes, he said.

He … Read more