It’s no secret that Americans are shopping and spending more money online than they did last year, but it’s not because of safety concerns and fears of crowded places.

Looks like the Internet is no longer the playground of the rich and educated. The medium’s future seems to depend on the lower end of the economic spectrum.

The ANA/AAAA marketing conference in New York started off with good news for rich media advertisers. Yahoo! Inc. today announced relationships with four rich media technology leaders, supplementing the current Yahoo! Rich Media product suite.

It looks like the publishers beat Gator. At least for the time being. At a hearing Friday afternoon in Virginia, the court said it would be issuing a “preliminary injunction order” honoring the publishers’ motion that Gator stop showing ads to consumers viewing the publishers’ Web pages between now and the conclusion of the trial.

I don’t normally talk about stock market stuff, but yesterday was a busy day for analysts watching our industry. And they all seem to be talking about the two giants: Yahoo and DoubleClick.

Given what we’ve all been through in the past few years, the online ad industry is full of skeptics and nothing inspires more doubt than forecasts of the future. Still, there is one man whose predictions make everyone take notice. That man is Universal McCann's Robert Coen, who yesterday trimmed his forecast for increased ad spending in the U.S. this year to 2.1% due to weakness in the magazine and cable TV markets.

Last night, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) officially kicked off their most ambitious endeavor to date – the much talked about ad campaign designed to convince the advertising world that interactive advertising is the one and only active ingredient of any media plan.

I’ve got good news for those of you advertising on newspaper sites. According to comScore’s latest findings, the average visitor to 12 of the 13 measured newspaper sites spends significantly more online than both the average Web user and the typical visitor to news and information sites.

Nielsen//NetRatings reports that Web surfers at work flocked to military Web sites during the week ending June 30. Traffic to military sites surged 72%, drawing nearly 1.1 million Web surfers this past week, as compared to 617,000 the week prior.

Things seem to be going very well for Google. The popular search site gained nearly four million unique audience members in May, more than any other property in the global top 25, according to the Nielsen//NetRatings Global Internet Index.