They say hindsight is 20-20, but former AOL executive Tom Grubisich says AOL's painful move from the top to the middle came long before its merger with Time Warner. In 1997 AOL founder Steve Case was so obsessed with growing AOL's subscriber base (which then represented about a third of all Internet users) that he neglected to focus on the thing that would ultimately make the Web the profitable place it is today: content. Years later, following a failed marriage to Time Warner, massive subscriber losses, and a distant fourth place position in revenues behind Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN, …

U.S. Internet giants are expected to report strong revenue and profit growth for the final quarter of 2005, driven by the ongoing shift in advertising and retail dollars to the Web and goosed by the holiday rush. Following a rosy holiday season, the American Internet giants are expected to report massive revenues for the final quarter of 2005, according to Dow Jones. Since online ad spending and retail sales leapt forward at double digit percentage increases, surpassing offline growth, analysts expect big numbers from the likes of Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and Amazon.com. A Goldman Sachs analyst expects Google's fourth quarter …

According to the Associated Press, Microsoft will use adCenter, its new system to sell online advertising, to serve all of the sponsored links appearing on its search engine, MSN Search, by the end of the second quarter. Microsoft currently serves about a quarter of the ads appearing in its search results; the rest are served up by Yahoo! subsidiary Overture Services. In June, Microsoft's contract with Overture, its pay-per-click provider, expires. Because PPC revenue is the way Google makes nearly all of its money and Yahoo! about half, Microsoft will be keen to bring the lucrative practice in-house. Eventually, adCenter, …

Privacy watchers are blaming Apple for eavesdropping on its users through its latest software update to iTunes. The new version of the popular music software scans a computer's digital music collection and recommends new songs to buy. An executive at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, speaking to the Los Angeles Times, criticized Apple's failure to disclose exactly what the new technology does to its users. Of course others say exactly the opposite: that the new service is prelude to the sort of customized online experience Internet advocates have been promising for the last ten years. In fact, according to the article, …

In one of the more curious marketing moves in recent memory, Dr. Phil has signed on as spokesperson for online dating service Match.com--perhaps to legitimize the practice as providing more than a convenient way for swingers to meet. Aside from appearing in ads promoting Match.com, Dr. Phil will help lead its users through the dating process with a new interactive program called MindFindBind, containing his self-help questionnaires and video pep talks. Presumably, having a self-help specialist on the site should help Match.com retain more users, who, in theory, wouldn't have much incentive to go back to the site after finding …

Audience measurement firm comScore Networks reports that for the week ending Dec. 18, online retail sales surpassed the $3 billion mark for the second time. Sales were $3.03 billion, 29 percent higher than last year. The previous week saw online sales hit $3.07 billion. By comparison, total retail sales for the week ending Dec. 17 grew 2.1 percent over the year before, according to ShopperTrak, which estimates national retail sales. Online travel sales for the same period were also robust, totaling $1.06 billion. comScore reports weekly sales on a three-week lag, but has already reported its total online sales figure …

Google is now letting mobile phone users create a personalized version of the Google home page. The personalization feature, available to most phones developed within the last year, allows those users to conduct Web searches, check Gmail, news headlines, weather and stocks from a central page. Google says the new feature is optimized to work on smaller screens, and enhances the mobile experience by providing a lot of useful information on a single page, as mobile network connections are far slower than the high speed connections on computers. Analysts say that giving users the ability to program relevant information is …

Google is attempting to copyright an application that considers such criteria as a device's screen size, its connection speed, and input capabilities, in determining whether to serve an ad to a Web page or trigger a phone call to the advertiser. The technology uses a method of scoring ads based on the limitations of a device, users' demonstrated behaviors, an ad's relevance, and ad pricing in determining which type of ad to show consumers. In its patent application, Google said this new "call-on-select" feature would be helpful to both consumers and advertisers because users wouldn't have to wait for Web …

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is investigating the possibility of complicit price fixing among major record labels in the music download business. Whereas major labels like Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony BMG and EMI Group wholesale their music to a la carte music services like Apple's iTunes, the suspicion is that they engage in a passive form of collusion in dealing with subscription services like Yahoo! Music or Napster. With subscription services the labels license their music to online services instead of letting them resell it, and because of this, the complexities of licensing deals come into …

Anonymity in the digital age can be a very powerful thing, writes Bruce Schneier of Wired. We do not have to willingly fork over our names, addresses, phone numbers to every Web site, ISP, email service provider, credit card company, or chat room that asks for it. In the digital age, the most important thing is accountability, he says. eBay is an excellent example of this: a huge auction site where millions of buyers and sellers meet, but nobody needs to know your name because of its ingenious feedback system, which lets everyone know who you've been doing business with …