Online Ads, Online Advertising | featured news

France's government says it has persuaded a leading Internet provider to stop blocking online advertisements — a controversial move that would have hit online search giants such as Google.

Microsoft said Thursday that an accounting adjustment to reflect a weak online ad business led to its first quarterly loss in its 26 years as a public company. The software company had warned that it was taking a $6.2 billion charge because its 2007 purchase of online ad service aQuantive hasn't yielded the returns envisioned by management. The non-cash adjustment is something companies do when the value of their assets decline. Microsoft Corp. paid $6.3 billion for aQuantive, only to see rival Google Inc. expand its share of the online ad market.

Google Inc's revenue increased 21 percent as strength in its Internet advertising business offset a persisting drop in ad rates, stirring hopes among investors the Web search leader is close to slowing that decline.

An advertising industry group says revenue from Internet advertising in the U.S. hit $8.4 billion in the first three months of the year. That's the highest for the first quarter, up 15 percent from $7.3 billion in the same period last year.

Google Inc's quarterly results fell short of Wall Street's heightened expectations for the holiday season as declining search advertising rates contributed to a rare miss, triggering a 9 percent slide in its shares.

Facebook's Ticker, the fast-scrolling tote board of pretty much everything your friends are doing, is ready to start selling you stuff.

Competition's all relative. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL all compete for ad dollars, but they all agree that marketers ought to put their budgets into premium content, not search or social.

Rapper Snoop Dogg gave props on Twitter to an ad for the Toyota Sienna minivan. Actress Tori Spelling linked to a website for rental cars. And reality TV star Khloe Kardashian soliloquized about the brand of jeans that accentuates the famous Kardashian derriere.

Google’s core business, search advertising, seems so far to have weathered the economic doldrums that have hurt other sites and publications relying on ads.

As search spending continued to rise in the just-ended third quarter, Google regained market share lost during the last couple of quarters to Microsoft's Bing search engine, according to a new report to be released Tuesday morning by Efficient Frontier, which manages about $1 billion in search, display, and social advertising for agencies and advertisers. ...