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NEW YORK--As head of Web video studio Vuguru, longtime entertainment exec Michael Eisner has been on a sort of tent-revival tour for the past few years, preaching the gospel of Internet video. On Thursday, his audience was the ad industry, and he was there to tell them not to be fazed by disappointing revenues on Web video.

"I'm seeding what I think will be a future business," Eisner explained. He's been vocal in admitting that online video isn't a profitable business yet. But it will be, he emphasized, and he wanted to position himself to … Read more

NEW YORK--Glam Media CEO Samir Arora showed up at ContentNext's EconAds conference on Tuesday afternoon looking dapper in brown leather shoes and a hot pink tie to match the handkerchief in his suit pocket. But really, he said, he runs a frugal company.

On his company's recent $84.6 million funding round, he said in an onstage interview with ContentNext's Rafat Ali, "We've really not spent that in anything so far." He added, "If you look at our history, we've raised $29.6 million to date before this round...we used less … Read more

This post was corrected to clarify when Adify was purchased by Cox Enterprises.

NEW YORK--Some have said that because of the wealth of personal information they store, social networks are the future of online advertising. Russ Fradin, co-founder and president of Adify, disagrees.

"Social networks, to date, what they've really done is drive performance-based CPMs down a lot," Fradin said in reference to the fact that a CPM (clicks per thousand impressions) rate of a dollar used to be considered low, but thanks to the influence of social networks, it's as low as three cents.

Fradin … Read more

NEW YORK--"Social media is killing Internet advertising," said Seth Goldstein, co-founder and CEO of SocialMedia Networks, as a roomful of ad-industry types at midtown Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel put down their BlackBerrys and pulled out their pens and notebooks.

They were eager to hear Goldstein, whose keynote kicked off Monday's User-Generated Content and Social Media conference organized by the Interactive Advertising Bureau's IAB Leadership Forum. That's because nobody in the ad industry has figured out how to turn the social-networking craze into a real moneymaker. Silicon Valley-based SocialMedia, an ad network that touts itself … Read more

This post was updated at 10:49 AM with comment from Ariel Waldman.

Some Web enthusiasts find microblogging service Twitter to be addictive because you can say absolutely anything you want--as long as it's 140 characters or less. So what happens when "saying anything" translates into harassment?

One avid Twitter user, Ariel Waldman, posted an entry Thursday on her personal blog, declaring that "Twitter refuses to uphold (its) terms of service."

She said she started receiving "multiple accounts of harassment" from another user of the microblogging service and that when she petitioned to … Read more

On Wednesday, after months of nothing but ambiguous screenshots, Facebook finally talked about its upcoming site redesign. It'll make it easier for members to see immediate, dynamic updates from their network of friends, a company representative said, and it'll cut down on some of the profile clutter by distributing user information across a set of tabs rather than having it all on one page.

The big question: Will members like it?

"Any user interface changes, large or small, carry with them a certain risk," developer Kyle Bragger told CNET News.com, adding that big decisions can … Read more

When it comes to developer activity, Facebook is no longer the only gnome in the garden of social media.

Last week, a blog post by developer Jesse Farmer set the stage for some lively discussion about whether the Facebook Platform, revolutionary at its launch, is approaching an expiration date--and it only debuted a year ago. Activity in the site's official developer forum has declined sharply, he observed, new applications are less likely to become successful, and now that there are more destinations for social applications--from gaming sites to OpenSocial--developer activity no longer has a single hub.

Farmer … Read more

Monday night's Digg Town Hall, the second in the social news site's live Webcast series hosted by CEO Jay Adelson and founder Kevin Rose, didn't answer any of the really big questions. No acquisitions, no Series C funding, no dirt about Rose's dating life.

But something it did reveal: There's a storm afoot at Digg, and it could very well shape the site's future.

When Kevin Rose founded Digg, the site caught on as a hub for quirky geek news, and it's retained a reputation as being full of extremely opinionated tech enthusiasts. … Read more

Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability, OpenID, DataPortability: Managing a bunch of different log-ins and passwords suddenly seems easy and straightforward.

Within a matter of days, some of the biggest names on the Web announced new projects that all have a roughly similar aim of making it possible for Web users to have a single social-media identity across the Internet--"data portability," as the general term has come to be known. MySpace.com was first out of the gate with the announcement of Data Availability, a way for members of the News Corp.-owned social network … Read more