Craigslist, the very popular and mostly free online classifieds site, has said it will begin charging New York real estate brokers for property listings as well as employers who post job listings in Boston, Washington D.C., San Diego, Calif., and Seattle. This means that Craigslist, which currently only charges employers for job listings in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, is about to make much more money. This year, analysts expect its revenue to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million. Fortune takes an in-depth look at the financials of the company, reckoning that its total expenses are …

Yahoo!'s ad sales chief says that enhanced behavioral targeting has become the massive Web portal's new focus. The company aims to boost the effectiveness of its ads by targeting users based on their surfing behavior on Yahoo!'s Web pages. While it does not sell personally identifiable information to advertisers, Yahoo! does capture user behaviors such as search queries or ads clicked on, so that advertisers can better match their ads to the consumers most suited for them. Yahoo! already targets by demographic and geographic information, charging advertisers a premium for the customized behavior segments.

After dodging one bullet, Research in Motion, the maker of the popular Blackberry mobile device, is still awaiting the decision of the United States Patent and Trademark Office as to whether the company's product infringes on a patent held by Arlington, Va.-based NTP. In a victory for the Blackberry maker yesterday, the patent office declared one of NTP's five disputed patents to be invalid. Research in Motion is facing a possible order to halt its Blackberry service in the U.S. A final decision on the patents could take years, lawyers said.

Just one week after America Online announced a major upgrade to its Instant Messenger service, the executive responsible for the division's turnaround has quit the company. Chamath Palihapitiya, 29 years old, has said he will leave the Time Warner company, planning to join a venture capital firm next year. For AOL, Palihapitiya's departure comes in the midst of negotiations with Google and Microsoft. over the sale of a minority stake in the Web portal.   According to the Wall Street Journal, the move emphasizes how Internet companies are once again on the radar of venture capital firms, who are eager to …

Search leaders Google and Yahoo! have confirmed they are now testing pay-per-call, a form of online advertising where advertisers only pay for the phone calls generated by their search engine listings. As opposed to the pay-per-click model, where advertisers pay each time a user clicks on their sponsored listing, with pay-per-call, advertisers only pay when users call a contact phone number that appears on the advertiser's listing. Google is testing a new model where consumers enter their phone number, and Google connects them directly to the merchant. Calls are free for users, but can be quite costly for advertisers: search …

Google's Chief Financial Officer George Reyes told a room full of reporters and Internet industry professionals that the company's recent aggressive hiring efforts are designed to position it better to compete with Microsoft Corp., according to Dow Jones Newswires. The Google chief added that its secondary stock offering in September was also designed "to build up a defensive war chest" against "one very large competitor," presumably Microsoft. Reyes said that Google is now focused on moving into branded advertising with graphical and rich media ads, an area which is dominated by another competitor, Yahoo! Contrary to reports in the press, …

Scarcely a month after the launch of the video iPod, Web users have already started watching pirated TV shows and movies on the portable media devices, the Wall Street Journal reports. File sharing technologies like BitTorrent make the formatting of TV shows and movies for devices like the iPod relatively simple for savvy Web users. There are also a sizable number of programs on the Web capable of cracking copy protection on DVDs. An analyst estimates that the average number of song purchases per iPod has fallen from 25 to 15 in the last year, while the amount of …

Brewing giant Anheuser-Busch, also renowned for its clever, high-profile network-TV ads, said it's planning to move ad dollars away from network TV toward cable and new media in recognition of "changes in viewership," according to a Wall Street Journal report. "What we're really doing is following the consumer," an Anheuser executive said, adding, "You have to be in cable and on the Internet and on people's cell phones." The Budweiser brewer is the latest (and one of the last) big marketers to shift its ad spending pattern due to shifting consumption habits. The company has consistently been the biggest …

Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) have drafted details for a bill that will ban the sale of video games rated M ("mature") or AO ("adults only") to minors. The so-called Family Entertainment Act, which will be introduced to Congress in the next two weeks, has already drawn fire from industry trade groups, which are certain to sue if the bill becomes a law. Some states, like California, Michigan, and Illinois, have passed laws to stop the sale of certain video games to minors, while others like Indiana and Michigan have struck down such laws on First Amendment …

Yahoo! is trying to be the first and last stop you make on the Web, says Investor's Business Daily. The one-time search engine/online directory is now the most visited destination on the Internet, having transformed itself into a newspaper-like content aggregator. For example, in preparing this news column everyday, this writer first reads AP, Reuters, and Dow Jones Newswire stories on Yahoo! News, going to their respective sites afterwards to retrieve the original links in order to keep the news organizations from giving the bosses at MediaPost a call. Why?--because Yahoo! slaps its own ads on its content partners' …