Advertising and marketing

Google grab bag: Translation, Apps uptime, and more

Google's always up to something, and here's a recap of some recent moves.

• Google is making room for gargantuan display ads on YouTube, according to Silicon Alley Insider, which cites advertising industry sources.

Making money off the popular video-sharing service is a top Google priority this year, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has said.

•  "Transparency" is a hot computing buzzword as everyone from Twitter to SalesForce.com seeks to share information about Web service availability so customers and users don't feel quite so helpless when things go wrong. And Google has showed it got … Read more

Mozilla's Google subsidy to last three more years

Mozilla and Google have extended a search deal through 2011, providing some financial security to the backer of the open-source Firefox Web browser.

"We've just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income," Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker said in a blog post Wednesday. (Updated: there was a misleading timestamp on the post; a Mozilla representative told me it actually went live Wednesday evening.)

Google pays for prominent placement in Firefox, including the default home page … Read more

YouTube's filters help copyright owners profit from pirated videos

Instead of just pulling down pirated clips, copyright owners are choosing to use YouTube's copyright filters to generate advertising revenue, Google said Wednesday.

Late last year, Google introduced a copyright identification system called Video ID, which tracks unauthorized videos. It enables a copyright owner to either block the clip, leave it up, or enable YouTube to sell ads against the material.

Google said on its blog Wednesday that copyright owners were choosing to turn a buck from unauthorized clips 90 percent of the time.

"It's clear to our (more than 300) Video ID partners that our technology … Read more

Study: Fox Interactive tops digital display ad market

Updated August 27 at 4:14 p.m. PDT, with correction to Fox Interactive Media's ranking for the preceding month.

Fox Interactive Media grabbed the most market share among digital display ad publishers in the month of June, according to a report released Tuesday by ComScore Ad Metrix.

Fox Interactive, which owns MySpace, accounted for 15.9 percent of display ad views, or impressions, during the month of June, followed by Yahoo, which ranked second with 10.5 percent of the market. The results marked the third consecutive month that Fox Interactive has maintained a lead over Yahoo, since … Read more

ASCII: An artful way around spam filters

An old computer art form is making a comeback as a newer way to evade spam filters.

For decades, computing fans have enjoyed a form of expression called ASCII art that shows pictures or messages as a low-resolution graphic, a grid made of numerous computer characters encoded with the venerable ASCII standard. With a photo digitized with ASCII art, for example, the "#" character can represent a dark pixel and "." a light pixel. And there are large fonts constructed from an assemblage of individual characters.

Now the technique has surfaced as a way to transmit information that'… Read more

Google launches free ad management tool

Google on Tuesday released the final version of Ad Manager, free software that lets smaller online publishers deal with some elements of offering and planning advertisements.

The software can be used to manage advertising inventory, with features to help them sell ads, deliver them, and forecast demand. It can deal both with ads on a publisher's site and on affiliated network sites. And conveniently for Google, it can be integrated with Google's AdSense service, so Google can display its own ads for any unsold ad inventory. With AdSense, Google shares ad revenue with publishers.

Google announced the release … Read more

Ex-Yahoo execs take on brand ad network, raise funds

For the last six years, the multi-billion-dollar breadwinner of the online advertising business have been those well-placed text links that appear on Google and other search engines.

Now, executives and investors want the money to starting pouring in from sales of graphical or video ads on the page.

Two former executives from Yahoo, one of the Web's prime-time locations for display ads, are banking on new demand from advertisers for online brand ads, promotions akin to the outdoor billboard or TV commercial. Last year, Elizabeth Blair and Andy Atherton--two former longtime executives in Yahoo's ad operations--started Brand.net … Read more

Analyst: Google's favorable foreign exchange rate to hit bump

After 10 straight quarters of grabbing a favorable foreign-exchange rate, Google's luck is expected to hit a bump in the third quarter, according to a report Monday by a Wall Street analyst.

The search giant, which relies on more than half of its gross revenues coming from overseas operations, is expected to take a sequential $22 million hit to its third-quarter gross revenue, due to unfavorable exchange rates, according to a report by Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal.

As a result, Google's anticipated international gross revenue is expected to come in at $3.03 billion for the third … Read more

Microsoft and WPP to swap advertising assets?

Microsoft's forays into online ads may be focused on yet another deal, according to a report Monday in Advertising Age.

Microsoft reportedly has restarted talks with ad giant WPP Group to sell its Avenue A/Razorfish agency to the advertising behemoth, but with a new twist, according to the report.

Advertising Age, citing sources familiar with the talks, said discussions now involve an asset swap, as opposed to an outright buy of Microsoft's Avenue A/Razorfish operations:

Microsoft unloads the agency in exchange for a WPP package that includes 24/7's Open AdStream publisher ad-serving tool plus … Read more