Advertising and marketing

RiskMetrics recommends re-election of current Yahoo board

Updated at 2:16 p.m. PDT with comments from RiskMetrics' Patrick McGurn and Yahoo shareholder activist Eric Jackson.

Yahoo's current board of directors received an endorsement Thursday, when influential advisory service RiskMetrics Group recommended to its institutional investor clients to vote for all of Yahoo's directors at the upcoming annual shareholders meeting.

That recommendation runs counter to one issued the day before by Glass Lewis & Co., another institutional investor advisory service that makes recommendations to pension funds, mutual funds and asset management companies on how to vote on issues contained within companies' proxies. Glass Lewis, as … Read more

Zimbra Desktop gives Yahoo Mail offline access

Update 11:03 a.m. PDT: I added more comment from Zimbra. Update 9:25 a.m. PDT: I added more background and details about my hands-on test.

Any of the 263 million Yahoo Mail users who were antsy for change now have something they can sink their teeth into.

The first real fruits of Yahoo's $350 million acquisition of Zimbra are becoming apparent with the release Thursday of the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. The e-mail software, available as a free download for Windows and Mac, works when the user is offline, and it offers options for basic online word … Read more

Sources: Google Video soured company on long-form video

As Google begins to make inroads in Hollywood, YouTube's parent company remains focused on short-form content, according to studio executives.

I reported Wednesday that the entertainment industry is much impressed with some of the ways Google is making YouTube more attractive to copyright owners, such as developing new technology that will scour the Web for pirated videos and insert ads into them. In the negotiations to obtain content, Google has focused on the rights to short-form material, said a manager at one of the top studios.

I've said for the past year that YouTube should launch a premium … Read more

Click fraud harder to detect, but rate stays flat

Click fraud, in which advertisers have to pay for bogus clicks on text ads, dropped only a smidgen to 16.2 percent of clicks in the second quarter from 16.1 percent in the first, according to new data from Click Forensics, a company that monitors such activity.

Companies including Google and Yahoo with networks to show ads with search and on partner web sites have efforts to protect against click fraud. However, the company said Tuesday, click fraud is getting harder to counter.

"Although click fraud rates were relatively unchanged in the second quarter, we found that the … Read more

Report: Facebook growing faster than MySpace

MySpace is still the top dog among social networks in the United States, according to researcher Hitwise, but its No. 2 rival Facebook is gaining fast.

MySpace attracted as much as 73 percent of U.S. visitor market share for social networks in June, down by 6 percent from the same period last year, according to a report released Wednesday from Hitwise. Facebook, its more staid social rival, lured about 17 percent of the U.S. market, up 40 percent from June 2007.

It's still a wide margin, but Facebook's threat looms large. And Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg emphasized this week … Read more

Yahoo president 'looking forward' to meeting Icahn

Yahoo President Sue Decker has taken the high road. In a CNBC interview that aired Wednesday, she said she looks forward to meeting investor activist Carl Icahn when he joins the company's board and would "love to get his advice."

Icahn, who reached a settlement with Yahoo earlier in the week, agreed to halt his proxy fight in exchange for being appointed to the board after the company's August 1 shareholders meeting. Yahoo also agreed to expand its board to 11 members and select two directors from a list that Icahn provided.

In the past two … Read more

Message to Microsoft: Google's gunning for ya--again

HALF MOON BAY, Calif.--What's Google's next big revenue stream? Text ads remain the cash cow for the present, but the company's future includes a big role for display advertising.

"I think the opportunity for display is pretty large because people are shifting what we think of as offline budgets to online," said CEO Eric Schmidt at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference here.

"The reason I say it's the next logical one--customers who buy text ads are also busy buying display ads from other sources...So, it's a big space," said … Read more

You can't talk online advertising without the 'G word'

HALF MOON BAY, Calif.--What if you organized a conference panel about digital advertising and nobody mentioned Google?

Yeah, duh.

Well, Fortune magazine almost accomplished that feat. During a session at its Brainstorm Tech conference devoted to the state of advertising in a softening economy, the three participants--Tom Bedecarre of AKQA, Lynda Clarizio of AOL, and Microsoft's Brian McAndrews--managed to get through three-fourths of their discussion without uttering the "G word."

Thankfully, one of Fortune's own, the ever-excellent David Kirkpatrick, asked from his seat in the audience whether anyone believed Google's current dominance in online … Read more

Glam Media snags Google exec

Glam Media, a digital content company that hosts hundreds of Web sites, blogs, and online magazines, has hired Michael Adair as vice president of corporate development and finance.

Adair previously was head of sales finance for Google North America, where he "helped lead the team that managed strategic acquisitions responsible for over $3.5 billion in revenue, including dMarc, YouTube, and DoubleClick," Glam Media said in a statement Wednesday. The company said its publications reach more than 10 percent of U.S. women who are 18 or older.

"With his deep operational and corporate development experience from … Read more