Advertising and marketing

Advertisers spent $9.26 billion on Internet ads during the third quarter of 2012, according to a report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

That's the most spent in a single quarter, according to the bureau's records. The IAB is a group of media and technology companies that sell 86 percent of online ads in the U.S. This latest revenue figure reflects a 6 percent increase from last quarter and a 18 percent increase from last year.

The executives at IAB said the increase is a reflection of how effective online advertising is for marketers (They don't … Read more

After two days of increasingly loud arguments, the flap over Instagram's new terms of service has started to quiet down. Amid widespread concern the Facebook-owned company was about to start selling user photos to advertisers, the company yesterday said it "has no intention" of doing so, and would change its terms of service to reflect that intention.

At this point we should probably turn our attention to more pressing worldly concerns, of which there are plenty. And yet the fracas has revealed something ugly in the way that many in the tech press blame average people for … Read more

The last thing you need as an entrepreneur is for your company to be engulfed in a public controversy. Just ask Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Path, Airbnb, Geeklist, and the countless other companies, big and small, that have been the target of press backlash and user vitriol.

It doesn't matter how careful you are: the more successful you become, the more likely it is that you'll make a mistake that ignites the blogosphere. There are ways to minimize the fallout and, more importantly, ways to prevent a large-scale user revolt in the first place.

Let's take Instagram's recent Terms of Service controversy … Read more

Autoplay video ads may be coming to Facebook's news feed within the next six months, according to AdAge.

These video ads are supposedly scheduled to hit the desktop version of the social network first, then could be rolled out to mobile. According to AdAge, the ads will most likely play 15 seconds, could be targeted to certain users, and may even have an auto-audio function. On the desktop version, the ads are expected to get users' attention by expanding out of the site's news feed into the left and right columns.

Facebook's goal is to attract advertisers … Read more

Some users may have noticed that on Black Friday, Walmart was ever-present in Facebook's mobile news feed. That's because the massive retailer was trying out an experiment -- it took out 50 million ads on the social network in an effort to drive users to its Web site for holiday deals.

This experiment was Facebook's biggest mobile advertising campaign ever, and it's looking like there will be more to come, according to the Wall Street Journal. The social network is apparently thinking about letting other companies partake in similar experiments.

Walmart's collaboration with Facebook was … Read more

Before you know it, smartphone-wielding football referees will be able to review their calls and respond to nasty tweets about those calls all in one go.

ESPN is set to start embedding video streams of instant replays into its tweets, according to various reports. Through a partnership with Ford and Twitter, ESPN's college football account, @ESPNCFB, will begin the effort today, as the bowl games kick in, and continue it through January 15, one week past the end of the college football season, according to Adweek.

A Twitter rep told Adweek that the clips would be 30 seconds or … Read more

Google's Eric Schmidt is a very busy man.

But he still found the time to interview fellow political philosopher Stephen Colbert, when the latter appeared at Google this week.

Indeed, Schmidt even found the time to post a chunk of the escapade onto his Google+ account. (The full hour has been posted to YouTube and I have embedded it at the bottom of this post.)

You might imagine that Colbert would be au fait with all of Google's services before presenting himself before an audience of Googlies.

But, no.… Read more

For Groupon Chief Executive Andrew Mason, there are a lot more questions than answers.

The young executive wasn't exactly verbose during an interview today with Fast Company's E.B. Boyd at the Mobile Loco conference in San Francisco. It was evident pretty quickly (aka after the first question) that there are a lot of things he's not really interested in chatting about right now.

He didn't want to talk about the rumor that Google was interested in buying Groupon, and he didn't want to broach the topic of possibly being acquired by someone else. That'… Read more

A new initiative in London will give passengers free Internet minutes in exchange for watching adverts en route to their destination.

Startup Eyetease has gotten approval from the Transport for London to roll out a new scheme for the city's iconic black cabs that will allow drivers and passengers to connect to the Internet for free in exchange for viewing ads.

Dubbed CabWiFi, the "ads for access" model makes passengers watch a 15-second advert in exchange for 15 minutes of Wi-Fi time. Drivers are given a separate login for the service, which the company touts as a way for cabbies to offset some of the roaming charges that are inflating drivers' monthly phone bills. … Read more