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Marketers ought to be aware that some consumers are suspicious about the phenomenon known as "behavioral targeting," a new report from eMarketer says.

Called "Behavioral Targeting Attitudes: The Privacy Issue," the report released Friday explores the digital ad strategy, which collects consumer information and uses it to serve up ads that they may find interesting or relevant. This has been the basis for high-profile programs like Facebook's Social Ads and MySpace's HyperTargeting, as well as Google's extraordinarily successful AdSense. (That's why you'll see ads for vacation homes in Gmail after you'… Read more

The economy may be lousy, but the amount of money spent on online advertising should continue to grow at double-digit rates all the way through to 2013, according to a report released Monday by JupiterResearch.

Total online ad spending is expected to increase just a little less than 20 percent this year, from $19.9 billion in 2007 to $23.8 billion. By 2013, Jupiter expects total online ad spending to hit $43.4 billion. (For you stat aficionados, that's a compound annual growth rate of 13 percent. By comparison, offline advertising is only expected to have a CAGR … Read more

Google has enlisted Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane to create an original animated series that it will distribute on the Web via its AdSense advertising system, according to The New York Times.

Google plans to use AdSense to syndicate the program--called Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy--to thousands of Web sites that are popular with MacFarlane's target audience, according to the newspaper. Advertising will be incorporated via "preroll" ads, banner ads, or "brought to you by" ads, according to the report.

MacFarlane is also reportedly working with advertisers to create original advertising to run … Read more

Google announced a tool called Ad Planner on Tuesday that lets advertisers find Web sites whose visitors match various demographic attributes.

"Enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit," the company said on its AdWords blog.

The tool, which was expected, also can show in detail how many people visit a particular Web site. The tool competes with offerings from companies including ComScore and Nielsen Online.

Right now, Google's tool is available by … Read more

InterActiveCorp mogul Barry Diller may be getting rid of brands like Ticketmaster, LendingTree, and HSN, but he still wants to sell ads on them.

The sprawling media company announced Monday that it will launch an ad network to handle inventory across all its brands, such as Evite and Citysearch, as well as the ones that Diller and his executive team are opting to spin off into separate publicly traded companies.

"Maybe we're not brothers and sisters, but we're cousins," IAC Advertising Solutions president Rich Stalzer told AdAge about the companies it will spin off. The AdAge … Read more

Ad-Aware has been around for nearly a decade and has been downloaded by hundreds of millions of people who want to scrub their computers clean. Publisher Lavasoft says that this edition includes better rootkit detection, faster updates, and other improvements. Check out what we thought about the latest version in this First Look video.

Google on Wednesday added a new factor, Web page loading speed, to the criteria by which it judges which text ads to place next to search results.

The search company, which makes almost all its revenue from the text ads, gives a boost to advertisers with better ad quality. Google announced Wednesday that quality now includes a measurement of the loading speed of the Web page users see when they click on an ad.

"Starting today, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords' quality scores," Google said on its Inside AdWords blog. "Keywords with … Read more

When Glam Media raised $84.6 million in February, international expansion was on its radar, and now we're seeing the results: the women's-focused ad network announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Monetise, a London-based digital-ad sales start-up.

(Yes, that's British spelling.)

All Monetise employees will become part of Glam under the deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed.

"The acquisition of Monetise speeds our entry into the important U.K. display ad market," Glam Chairman and CEO Samir Arora said in a release. "Monetise has strong relationships with London advertising agencies and … Read more

Blog aggregation start-up Technorati will be launching an ad network later on Tuesday called "Technorati Media," TechCrunch reported. This marks a new direction for the company, which has heretofore focused on blog search and directories.

As TechCrunch commenters note, this is not exactly revolutionary. Ad networks are everywhere. What makes Technorati Media different from a Glam Media or Federated Media is apparently the fact that it'll advertise on "the little guys" as well as high-traffic blogs, promising a better deal than Google's ubiquitous AdSense (it's similar to what Six Apart is doing).

There … Read more