NY Times
MoveOn.org, the nonprofit online public interest group, and civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation begin a campaign today against AOL and Yahoo for planning to charge high-volume e-mail senders fees guaranteeing delivery of their messages. Together, the activist groups have enlisted about 50 other supporting organizations including the Gun Owners of America, the Democratic National Committee and the National Humane Society. They have also set up a Web site called DearAOL.com, which contains an online petition users can sign asking AOL to change its policy. The groups worry the fees will be a disadvantage to "charities, small businesses and …
DM News
Despite an increase in magazine industry advertising last year, the Internet and Web advertising pose a huge challenge for most publishers--especially business-to-business and certain categories of consumer magazines. BTB and vertical segment advertisers are increasingly driving their print budgets to the Web, and according to DMNews, that's unlikely to change. Like newspapers, consumer niche magazines and BTB publishers must figure out a way to create a meaningful online presence. Another problem for these specialty publications is increased pressure from buying and planning agencies to produce the kind of reporting they've become accustomed to with Web advertising.
ClickZ
Advertisers who don't measure the offline impact of their search marketing campaigns will be unable to determine the overall effectiveness of the campaigns, says search marketing firm iProspect, releasing a study conducted by Jupiter Research. In the survey, 62 percent of Internet users who researched products online during the holiday season used a search engine to do so, and nearly half ended up buying the product they were searching for offline. Merchant sites like Overstock.com were slightly more popular, with 63 percent of consumers using them. Just 26 percent of users visited shopping-specific search engines like Shopping.com and Froogle. While …
ClickZ
Last year was a steady year for growth for behaviorally targeted ads, according to data from 24/7 Real Media's OnTarget behavioral targeting network. BT ad campaigns in 2005 delivered twice as many impressions as the year before, while click-through rates soared 166 percent. 24/7 execs attributed growth to increased advertiser and publisher awareness of the ad channel, as well as targeting technology improvements made by behavioral targeting vendors. The report said campaigns targeting "Techies," "Women," and "African Americans" were the most popular, together accounting for approximately 60 percent of all impressions during the third quarter. "Retargeting," which refers to displaying …
Marketwatch
Marketwatch columnist Bambi Francisco asks: what could a company like Google learn from MySpace? Answer: the power of community and user-generated influence. Discoveries by friends and colleagues are often so important to users that they instantly stop whatever it is they're doing to investigate themselves. Why not port this idea over to searching? A sharing component could make searching more relevant to all. Some companies currently offer glimpses of this. A company called Jeteye lets users drag and drop images or text into files or folders and send them to friends. For example, a user could create a folder containing …
Associated Press
As we've heard before, the major U.S. phone companies want to set up toll booths on the information superhighway, charging Web publishers for the right to have their content delivered at high speeds. Naturally there is intense opposition to this, both from consuemr activist groups and Web companies themselves. Vinton Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, who was a marquee player in the development of the Internet, warned a Senate committee that "allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success." The major phone companies …
TheStreet.com
Amid questions of the channel's effectiveness, one of the Web's biggest interactive shops is forecasting that search will command a smaller share of its advertising output this year than last year. Search represented 35 percent of the gross billings of aQuantive's Avenue A/Razorfish last year, but the ad shop is reporting that that share will likely fall 2 or 3 percentage points this year as advertisers migrate their interactive spending to branding opportunities on Web portals and niche sites. You'd think click fraud paranoia might have something to do with this, but according to TheStreet.com, citing "several recent surveys," advertisers …
TechWeb News
The Motion Picture Association of America looks poised to target search engines next in its battle to take back control of content they feel is rightfully theirs. This does not include Google, Yahoo and the rest of the big five; on Friday, the MPAA filed suit against IsoHunt.com and Torrentbox.com for illegally providing links to free copies of movies and TV shows. Both sites said they would battle the trade group "for the right for technological progress." The MPAA filed seven total lawsuits on Friday, but the move to target search engines is a departure from the organization's practice of …
WSJ (paid subscription required)
This weekend AskJeeves officially became Ask.com, in a move designed by Barry Diller to make the search engine the focal point of his Web conglomerate, IAC/InteraActiveCorp. The Web firm has hired the ad shop TBWAChiatDay to create a multimillion-dollar rebranding campaign for the search engine. Ask's new message, "Use Tools, Feel Human," highlighting the site's user-friendliness, bows on the Web this week, with TV ads to follow next week. In one ad, a scientist asks an orangutan how Ask's tools facilitate using the Internet. The ape says, "Without tools we'd just be, just be... animals in pants." Ask execs decided …
Cnet News.com
The Justice Department denied requesting information that violates the privacy of Google's users, as the company contended in a recent court filing. Google said the government's request for one million pages from its massive search index could be harmful to the company in numerous ways, particularly by disclosing important trade secrets. Google's refusal is holding up the government's efforts to defend a 1998 act protecting children from pornography. The Justice Department, seeking to highlight flaws in Web filtering technology, said the data, which is being used to conduct a survey in aggregate, would in no way compromise user privacy, and …