In the arms race for digital map supremacy, Internet users are now becoming important tools for media firms. Yahoo!, for example, has directly appealed to its users to help them add local business information to its mapping services. Microsoft is asking mountain bikers to help them plot the best trails through parks. As more and more data is becoming available to digital map providers, consumer usage of digital maps seems to be increasing concurrently. According to audience measurement firm Nielsen/NetRatings, visitors to online maps increased 28 percent this year. In its article about the hot and competitive digital mapping business, …

Wired takes an in-depth look at click fraud, a rapidly growing problem for the $8 billion plus search engine and contextual marketing industry. Click fraud occurs when companies deploy programs that repeatedly click on competitors' ads, driving up their costs and eating away at the monthly spending budgets they set up with search engines like Google and Yahoo! A second form of click fraud occurs when publishers on Google's AdSense program use similar tactics to repeatedly click on the ads sent by Google and Yahoo! to their own Web sites, which, in turn, brings them more revenue. Click fraud has …

The massive Consumer Electronics Show, held in Las Vegas at the beginning of every year, has long been thought of as a weather vane for the year ahead in sexy consumer gizmos and gadgets, but increasingly--and particularly this year if you have a look at the session line-up--Internet media is making headlines. In fact, as Ad Age points out, branding figures to be a hot topic at this year's show, as more and more marketers look into branded entertainment and high-tech marketing. This year's sessions include: "Advertising and Games: From In-Game Advertising to Cross Promotion and Custom Brand Extension"; "Internet …

Cnet has a look back at 2005, dubbing it the year of Web's rebirth. Five years after the dot com meltdown triggered a nationwide recession, Internet media is thriving as it never has before. Cnet writes that convergence is now (finally) upon us, a generation that has grown up with the Web is coming of age, and a digital, social revolution is imminent. Not only is the Web bringing the once anonymous to prominence through tools like blogging, but it's also leading countries like India into a technology renaissance. The special feature discusses all of the major stories of the …

There's no question that the migration of media consumption to the Internet has accelerated the allocation of ad dollars to the Web. Whereas next year's forecasts for traditional media spending have been tepid at best, it seems those for Internet media are constantly being upgraded. Credit Suisse First Boston is the latest firm to follow this pattern, having revised its Internet ad spending forecast for 2006 to 32 percent growth, up from 21 percent. The investment firm expects spending to reach $16.6 billion by this time next year. In particular, as a result of increased broadband content offerings, rich media …

Time Inc. is now making formerly premium content available for free on its Web site, but only after users agree to sit through several pages of interactive sponsorship materials from a single advertiser. The Time Warner company decided to test the idea for its highly anticipated "Person of the Year" cover story; it used technology from Ultramercial forcing users to watch a multilayered Chrysler ad before giving them access to the story and the magazine's database of past articles. If the strategy is successful, Time said it plans to use Ultramercial's technology again with future cover stories or other content …

Next year, music, television, and movie companies will be looking to Congress for help in keeping their content from appearing on peer to peer networks, or from being copied for friends. Digital rights management (DRM), which broadly refers to the ability to curtail the functions of one's own software, will be a major issue in 2006, but we've already seen some early examples, such as CDs that keep users from playing them on computers or being copied. Under pressure from entertainment companies, firms have even been scaling back the functionality of their own products. Apple has started releasing updates to …

Preliminary online holiday spending figures show that sales this year should be up about 25 percent from 2004. ComScore Networks reports that online retail spending reached $17 billion from Nov. 1 to Dec. 21, a 24 percent gain over last year, and should reach approximately $19 billion for the entire holiday season. The week ending Dec. 18 was one of the biggest of the year, up nearly 30 percent from the corresponding week in 2004. Interestingly, the transit worker strike in New York City aided online retail sales: online's share of total retail sales between Dec. 20 and Dec. 22 …

Revenue Science, a behavioral targeting firm, has received $25 million in venture capital funding. Its total backing is now $70 million in the last five years. The company plans to put the money into its expanding behavioral targeting network. A behavioral targeting network allows advertisers to buy behavioral segments across several Web sites. Adweek uses the example of a user who has demonstrated that he is in-market for a car being shown auto-related ads while browsing ESPN.com. Revenue Science's publishers include ESPN.com, Edmunds.com and The Wall Street Journal.

Nearly one in five Web logs could be spam, according to new research. Umbria Communications, a consumer media monitor from Boulder, Colo., found that 2.7 million out of 20.3 million blogs are created purely for marketing purposes. The firm estimates that between 10 and 20 percent of Web logs are spam. Many display stolen content from RSS feeds in order to trigger text ads from AdSense, Google's contextual ad program. Umbria examined results from blog search engines Technorati, IceRocket, and BlogPulse this October to conduct the research. It actually found that Google's Blogger tool feeds the most Web log spam, …