Online Ads, Search Engine | featured news

Google's third-quarter earnings rose 27% as the company saw improvement in the online advertising market. Revenue rose 7.3%.

As long as advertisers pay for clicks, there will be click fraud. And the more people combat it, the more sophisticated the attacks become to get around the defenses that advertisers, search engines, and others put in place.

"The Lam/Suen family was allegedly using click fraud to make more money for their site WoWMine.com—mainly by clicking competitors' ads until their competitors' ad budgets were exhausted.

The possible sale of Yahoo’s HotJobs would be a huge blow for members of the Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Newspaper Consortium, as the alliance is the only source of help-wanted-ad revenue for nearly 200 papers. But that’s apparently not deterring papers from joining.

More on NewspapersTerry Widener has been selling newspaper ads for 35 years. But until last fall, Ms. Widener, a 53-year-old saleswoman at The Knoxville News Sentinel in Knoxville, Tenn., had never sold an Internet ad.

Then in a two-week sales "blitz" intended to test an innovative partnership between newspapers and Yahoo, she persuaded advertisers to buy $200,000 in online ads that ran on the paper's Web site and on Yahoo. That represented about a seventh of the amount she typically sells in an entire year.