YouTube has finally found a way to make money. Surprise! It's advertising. Nike, Warner Bros., MTV2 and Dimension Films are among the first set of marketers littering the site with commercial clips. Again, this is no surprise given the site's almost unbelievable growth. In December 3 million videos streamed daily. Today: 40 million. For those unfamiliar with YouTube, it's a huge destination for any kind of video content. Users can stream any video uploaded to the site and made available to the public. The most popular clips get shared virally and the number of plays can increase exponentially in a …

Yahoo, which yesterday reported solid first quarter ad revenues, is reportedly testing a new home page and a new wireless service. TechCrunch offers some screen shots of the new home page; the redesign appears to be largely cosmetic, moving the clutter of Yahoo services like e-mail and My Yahoo to the left side margin. The Web giant is also considering a service that would let Yahoo users access certain restricted Wi-Fi networks for specific communication services like Yahoo Messenger and Voice over Internet Protocol calls. This would be particularly handy for those of us who work on the move and …

Ever read a study or look at a poll that makes you wonder where, exactly, they got those people? Sometimes I'm astonished by just how little those of us who don't dwell on the Internet for a living understand about the most basic Web activities. According to a new study from JupiterResearch and iProspect, an SEM firm, more than a third of Web searchers actually believe that the companies appearing at the top of natural search results are necessarily the top firm in their field, either in size or success. Thirty-six percent believed this to be the case, while 39 …

Michael Eisner is joining forces with the venture capital arm of Time Warner, his former media nemesis when he was head of The Mouse House. Together, he and Time Warner Investments have contributed to a $12.5 million round of funding for Web TV startup Veoh Networks. Veoh calls itself "the first Internet television peer casting network." It creates peer to peer software that helps content publishers and consumers share published content that has been approved by a team of editors, in an attempt to sidestep piracy. Veoh is differentiating itself from the likes of YouTube by not limiting the length …

Consumer packaged goods brands are some of the largest advertisers worldwide; increasingly, they too are shifting large portions of their ad budgets to the Internet, according to The Wall Street Journal. Companies like General Mills and Kraft are expected to more than double their online advertising efforts this year, underlining the Web's threat to traditional media revenues. The money has to come from somewhere, right? "Our job is to invest in where consumers are engaging with media," says one PepsiCo Internet marketing vice president, who expects online spending to increase from 1 percent of his company's budget to between 5 …

The TV shift to online is upon us, and the networks' collective apprehension is evident in the way they've cautiously dipped their toes into what is--undoubtedly, according to blogger Kenneth Musante--a vast ocean of opportunity. But it's not just that TV advertising has become less effective in the face of the new medium's measurability. TV itself is dying, Musante says, because today's consumers are no longer content to sit around and wait for their favorite shows to come on. Soon, time-shifting will be the norm, people will consume media completely on their terms, and all content will be distributed over …

Yahoo argues that its juiced-up mapping service, unveiled last week, now provides the most detailed maps on the Web. So what? you might ask. As Kelsey Group analyst Neil Polachek says, "It's much more important that [portals] nail the user experience." Then they can focus on comprehensiveness, one-upmanship and making money. The three biggest services, AOL, Yahoo, and Google, are still far from comprehensive in the information they provide, but improving. None of these companies are really making any money on providing info, either, but right now, the focus is more on keeping users at their respective portals (yes, Google …

Bambi Francisco of Marketwatch argues that the major search engines could see their numbers decline as content creation on the Web becomes a collective, social effort. But what do broadband video and other forms of entertainment have in common with search, a function for finding information? Francsico says its unlikely Generation Y--which will completely inherit the earth in the next 10 to 20 years--will remain satisfied with general search engines. Granularity, and a richness of information about a given topic, are more interesting to this group than a single relevant entry from a search query. How can search engines be …

It's been said before and it'll be said again and again, until, perhaps, some kind of legislation is put into effect to protect advertisers: click fraud is not going away. We can only wonder how Google and Yahoo feel about the issue, which threatens the very core of their business model. For those that don't know, click fraud most often occurs when a competing advertiser uses an automated program to relentlessly compose search queries whereby they click on a competitor's text ad, until they shore up their competitor's AdWords budget, effectively wasting it.   It also occurs when AdSense publishers, …

News Corp. has a real problem if a Wired reporter says she had no trouble matching the names of certain MySpace users to California's online database of registered sex offenders. The reporter simply ran the names of randomly selected sex offenders in San Francisco and Sonoma County through MySpace's user search engine and turned up no fewer than five men whose names, photos, ages, and astrological signs matched those found in the state's sex offender registry. While none of the men appeared to have minors on their list of friends--and assuming the profiles are authentic--it looks as though MySpace faces …