Social Networking, Online Advertising | 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.

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.

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.

Most Internet analysts suggest that MySpace fell from grace because it crumbled in the face of stiff competition from Facebook. But a Reuters report suggests that it may have been Google that dealt the fatal blow by accident as long ago as 2006.

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....

As Goldman Sachs pours $450 million into Facebook, Japan, with a large and growing online advertising market, is a big hole in Facebook’s global fabric.