The rapid growth of the online advertising marketplace has made the Internet the envy of other major media, but publishers are beginning to realize that they may actually have too much of a good thing. There's a hidden price in the rapidly expanding supply of online advertising inventory and it appears, quite literally, to be the price people pay for it.

Well, well, well, MediaVest, Ed:Blog sees what you did. Don't think we haven't noticed. We know you like to keep your dealings shrouded in a cloak of secrecy.

At a time when many traditional media are posting double-digit reductions, it's heartening to see one that is moving in a (sort of) upward direction. That medium is digital out-of-home. In q408, pq Media projected that digital ooh - which includes both static signage and full-motion audio and video on a flat screen - would finish

In the never-ending struggle to monetize digital video, technology providers are throwing ad units at every last pixel of visible real estate: pre- and post-rolls, bottom-third and pop-down overlays, and media player skins. The only space left may lie inside the frame itself, in all that background empty space where video action doesn't occur.

It's a proven fact that women do the majority of the shopping, both online and off, in all but a few categories. If your products fall into any of the tens of dozens of categories in which women control the spending, your career may depend on getting women not only to listen to or see your message, but to embrace it, pass it on and talk endlessly about your product's virtues to millions of other women.

Something extraordinary is happening: we are witnessing the creation of an entirely new Internet model that few people could have foreseen even three years ago. According to some analysts, as much as 70 percent of consumer time online is now spent viewing content created not by professional editors, but by fellow consumers. Most eyeballs are trained on social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube.

eBay isn't a Web site - it's an obsession. Ever since Internet users learned how easy it was to shop from home, it's been a credit card and click. Shopping for a home, however, is a different story, considering that one click would equal a $200,000 mortgage and, therefore, a death wish to many economically uncertain consumers.

Have you heard? Apparently, sex sells - and no company takes that adage to pervy, pornographic heights like American Apparel. Though the company's ads have long featured sad-looking lady friends of ceo Dov Charney in various states of undress, AA pushed its final frontier in late December by hiring an actual porn star - 20-year-old Sasha Grey, Adult Video News' Female Performer of the Year - to flash her full-frontal bits.

I buy a gift online for my niece every Christmas, which results in my getting dozens of children's catalogs all year long. I don't mind my data being collected, but I wish marketers understood that I'm not interested in Lite-Brite, Play-Doh and Legos 11 months out of the year. And that is where consumer purchase intent data exchange BlueKai hopes to change targeting.

You know all that dead weight your Facebook account drags around in the form of extraneous work acquaintances, one-night stands and middle-aged family members who only recently discovered the Internet? Thanks to Burger King, you now have quite the compelling excuse to finally cull them from the herd.