Advertising, Social Networking | featured news

Almost lost in Zynga’s disappointing fourth-quarter earnings report was one bright spot: advertising. Ad revenues jumped 230%, to $27 million in the fourth quarter–almost four times the social gaming company’s 59% rise in overall revenues. Chalk it up in part to a new, more interactive kind of ad from “engagement marketing” firm SocialVibe.

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

Facebook's first-half revenue roughly doubled to $1.6 billion, underscoring the world's largest social network's appeal to advertisers.

ComScore and Nielsen are introducing rating systems for Facebook, to help advertisers better compare the social-networking site to traditional advertising outlets such as TV and print.

Facebook is so large that it now accounts for about one out of every three ad impressions in the U.S., according to the latest statistics from comScore Ad Metrix. In the first quarter of 2011, comScore estimates that 1.1 trillion ads were served to U.S. Internet users, and 346 billion of those (or 31 percent) were on Facebook.

Facebook users who check in to a store or click the "like" button for a brand may soon find those actions retransmitted on their friends' pages as a "Sponsored Story" paid for by advertisers....

Facebook said its head of advertising sales, Michael Murphy, is stepping down in December, leaving a vacancy in one of the social-networking giant's key positions.

Twitter is now selling its "Promoted Tweets" for $100,000, according to an article in this morning's Wall St. Journal. "Promoted Tweets," which allow companies to buy the top spot on Twitter's Search results page, is just one of the microblogging network's new advertising initiatives as of late. The idea behind these digital ads is that the service allows companies to associate themselves with a certain trend or keyword.

The social-networking site is aggressively pitching to big advertisers like Ford Motor Co. and PepsiCo Inc. the latest in a series of ad formats that tell users which of their Facebook friends have expressed interest in the brand or product featured in the ad.

Twitter this week began testing a new type of advertising: “Promoted Trends.” Under the new system, brands can pay to appear below the “Trending Topics,” the most talked-about terms on Twitter at any given moment.