If Business Week says it, it's so: advertisers are a lot wiser about the Web these days. Why? Measurability has made the medium irresistible to national advertisers, who, for so long, have lamented the waste inherent to a business built on a foundation of imperfect measurement. Of course, not all Internet numbers are perfect, either. There are problems like click fraud, for one thing, and the fact that some 10 percent of Web users regularly erase their cookies makes it clear that for all its counting, Internet advertising isn't an exact science. But it's continually coming up coming up with …

What percentage of Google's advertising referrals are the result of click fraud? We still don't know, despite the company's $90 million credit settlement with advertisers last week. The Washington Post takes an inside look at companies affected by click fraud, both advertiser victims, and the auditing firms they hire to analyze where each click comes from. One advertiser, Radiator.com, said auditing firm ClickFacts reported "very high fraud rates to us"--35 percent of referrals from Google and 17 percent from Yahoo. The company said it will present Google and Yahoo with the report next week, seeking a refund. That said, both …

In response to a Business Week article written by House Democrat Rick Boucher on the fairness of legislation banning a two-lane Internet, Tom Tauke, a Verizon Communications executive vice president, warns that "stricter regulation of the Internet is unnecessary and could discourage broadband investment." He says Congress' plans to impose a new set of requirements on America's broadband networks is "an attempt to fix a hypothetical problem that does not exist," and could also stop any future investment by network operators in even faster technology in the future. Far from limiting consumer access to certain content, Tauke says Verizon has …

As the Economist notes, media firms are in a mode where they must experiment with new media revenue streams, or they run of risk of remaining on the sidelines to watch the changing of the guard in their industry from afar. Because their old businesses no longer generate the kind of revenue they used to, experimentation has become a necessity for these big media firms, who are now under pressure from shareholders demanding to see evidence of such forward thinking. All this means traditional media firms have become some of the world's busiest companies, shedding weighty assets and corporate …

VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol, is out there, so are third generation cellular networks, wireless e-mail devices, and a convenient means of syndicating Web content into a single access point, called RSS. However, changes come fast and furious in the technology industry, but changes in regular consumer behavior lag far behind those of early adopters. By all media accounts--meaning any of the countless stories out there about how VoIP spells the end for the public switch telephone--the land line phone should be dead already. To be sure, VoIP gets a lot of press from providers like Skype and Vonage and …

Goodmail, the company responsible for convincing AOL and Yahoo they should charge marketers for bulk commercial e-mails, thinks it can solve the problem of e-mail spam and fraud by having marketers pay gatekeepers like itself for guaranteed delivery. However, Goodmail's customers, like AOL and Yahoo, now have to prove that their recipients actually want their mail, as the company is constantly checking and probing sender behavior. It also makes it very easy for overzealous recipients to complain about unwanted messages. Too many complaints, and senders will lose their accounts--can you imagine being an e-mail marketer and all of a sudden …

Sony's PlayStation 3 will not be ready for launch next month, as was widely speculated by industry pundits, but at least one analyst thinks major game publishers won't be adversely affected by the delay. Sony is now planning to launch 2 million PS3 consoles globally in November, shipping one million units each month thereafter. Standard & Poor's Equity Research Analyst Gary McDaniel says the delay could scale back Japanese sales somewhat, but should not affect U.S. sales, since the projected U.S. launch of November is in line with earlier estimates. McDaniel says Electronic Arts and Activision, the two biggest game …

Visa USA has made its first significant ad buy in a video game, underscoring a trend among big brands to buy exposure in the engaging world of video games. In fact, the credit card company has bought more than a few background digital billboards, playing a crucial role in the development of the game, which is based on the hit CBS series "CSI." In one of the game's five criminal cases, Visa's fraud monitoring abilities save the day when a suspicious charge emerges on a victim's credit card. Of course, in addition to this small piece of the plot, Visa's …

As expected, Google is developing its Google Base platform into an online retail service, but the company has set its sight on conquering the European retail market first, according to the Financial Times. The proposed service would give retailers access to hundreds of millions of Google users. However, to get the service going, retailers, real estate brokers and others first need to give Google details of the goods and services they offer; the search giant then packs and indexes that information into a user-friendly search engine, giving users a massive database of brands offering different goods and services. Google …

South Korea may point to the future of mobile phone usage in the U.S. Since January, some cell phone users have had the ability to watch television on their phones--for free--through a government-subsidized technology called Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, or DMB. Seoul, the nation's capital, is the first city to make mobile TV available around the clock and for free. Only those with the more expensive DMB-enabled phones can receive the free TV service. So far, consumers report that the images are relatively free of "jerky motion," but certain sports, like soccer, could be difficult to see on the small screens. …