All this talk about dropping stock prices and dwindling ad revenues of online companies may threaten industry-wide fear and doom, but one company isn't giving up on dot-coms just yet. American Media Services and AMS Interactive Media announced today the launch of AMS Financial Services http://www.amsfinancialservices.com, responding to recent decreases in the availability of VC financing for dot-coms and start-ups. The new division will facilitate loans for clients specifically for media buys, to complement the traditional and interactive media buying and planning services currently offered by the companies. Jon Greenberg, president of AMS, said "There are excellent …

A profitable dot-com? What a concept! Apparently it's no longer an anomaly, though. According to the latest research from Shop.org and The Boston Consulting Group Online, retailers are marginally improving their performance while taking concrete steps to increase overall profitability in the first quarter on 2000. And according to the survey, those concrete steps are focused on shifting away from expensive television advertising to online advertising and marketing, at least in part. Although 40% of surveyed businesses re-negotiated or cancelled their portal deals, online advertising actually increased to 59% of total marketing spending. Researchers said that retailers most …

In response to yesterday's Minute, many of our readers cast their votes on the future of the web, and it's clear to see that our industry is brimming with... tempered enthusiasm. One reader, Don Panek, President of TelephonyWorld.com, seconds the opinion of Lehman analyst Holly Becker, who doubts the future of huge online portals. "I certainly agree with the premise that traditional dollars are not necessarily going to be thrown to the "Big" net players, and I am not surprised that there has been a noticeable decline," Panek writes. "While it seems as though the big gold rush …

As AdWeek reported yesterday, a Lehman Brothers analyst raised doubts about Yahoo's valuation and prospects for the second half of the year amid a decline in ad impressions and "a difficult environment for dot-com companies." According to the story, Lehman analyst Holly Becker said there is no sign traditional advertisers are embracing online advertising. Ms. Becker added that Lehman considered it "highly unlikely" that traditional advertisers "will pick up the slack of the dot-com fall-off." Becker is not the first market analyst to doubt the Internet's traditional-advertiser-supported future. If a giant like Yahoo is in trouble, what …

The majority of all online ad banners have short life spans, running on average three weeks or less, according to a new report released today by AdRelevance, a division of Media Metrix. With few advertisers running large online campaigns, an overwhelming majority of advertisers have less than a 0.01% share of all online advertising impressions. AdRelevance found that although most banner ads run for three or fewer weeks, the average banner runs for five and a half weeks. The automotive industry schedules online ads to run the longest, an average of 7.8 weeks. This is almost twice as long …

Just as the little calculator attached to my mouse pad began showing signs of exhaustion, the tech world came up with something far more complicated - a mouse pad with rotating ads and a credit card reader. This new gadget is definitely worth a mention on these pages, because it is advertising-supported and could make buying stuff online a whole lot easier for your target audience. Here's how it works: web users order a MySmart pad from http://www.mysmart.com for $5.95 and MySmart sends them a mouse pad that includes 20 buttons which, besides connecting users to specific …

All this talk about rich media has inspired Net-mercial, a streaming media startup, to enter the ad network space with an affiliate marketing program called Jump.Space. The new Jump.Space ads are activated when a viewer clicks on a link, and are played during the "jump" to the affiliate's website. According to Net-mercial, there is a definite need in the ad market for technology of the "interstitial kind," regardless of whether the average web user has the bandwidth and software necessary to see or interact with the ad. Why? Because interstitials have been shown to produce click through rates …

Even if advertisers remain skeptical about wireless ad delivery as a whole, companies seem to be diving into developing wireless advertising systems head first. As arguable as the prediction may be, Motorola expects that more people will be accessing the Internet from a wireless device than a desktop computer by 2004, which could be a partial reason why so many companies are working to get a head start on technology. Take this morning's announcement from AdForce, for example. The CMGI subsidiary has decided to collaborate with OpenGrid, Inc., a leader in providing intelligent wireless eBusiness solutions, to "further …

As CMP Media reported yesterday, it was a bad week for consumer websites: Living.com ceased operation, Kozmo.com laid off about 10% of its workforce, and Wine.com and Wineshopper.com combined operations. So far, this year's dot- com fallout has resulted mostly in outright bankruptcies. And, according to the story, there's more bad news behind the bad news - this downward trend will likely continue for the foreseeable future. There are, however, several sites that aren't too worried. Media Metrix - http://www.mediametrix.com - today released the top 50 Web and Digital Media properties for June 2000 and it looks like the …

Media Metrix today released a report documenting significant shifts in the composition of the online population according to household income over the past year. The study reveals that while the number of Internet users with annual household incomes under $25k have grown nearly 50%, outpacing the growth of total users, they still only represent 9.7% of the overall Internet using population. Lower-income Web users, new to the Internet, tend to be less experienced surfers and spend more time online - about 13 hours per month - viewing more unique pages of content (over 700 pages in June 2000). …