Google and Yahoo affiliates are getting themselves into trouble with the firms' many national advertisers, according to a Business Week article. It works like this: the Web's biggest sellers of advertising space often sign up partners to distribute advertisers' ads on other sites in return for a small fee. Sometimes, those partners sign up other partners who sign up other partners whose business it is to show ads via programs that are surreptitiously installed on users' computers as they surf the Web. That's called spyware, and spyware companies make their money by showing contextual ads pop-ups and pop-unders gleaned from …

Microsoft is ramping up its search efforts on several fronts, having recently launched Windows Live Search Beta, a customized search system, a new academic search feature, as well as a whole new search advertising system for advertisers. Its latest search add-on, according to a Business Week report, is a question-and-answer tool that lets users direct questions to a specific group, such as a group of friends, rather than receive an automated list of results from a search engine. So-called social search is a method whose time has come, says one MSN exec. Companies like Google, MSN and Yahoo are trying …

Nike has rolled out a software-based TV channel for Joga.com, a joint global social networking partnership with Google aimed at soccer fans. The video application is a downloadable through the global site, which users can join by invitation only. Features include Nike's TV spots for "Joga Bonito" (play beautiful), a rap song featuring a U.S. national team soccer player, and several other clips featuring Brazil's current and former FIFA World Players of the Year Ronaldinho and Ronaldo. The application automatically downloads new content each week, notifying end users when it's available. The desktop application was created by rich media vendor …

Google, Yahoo, and eBay, three Internet industry bellwethers, are set to report first quarter earnings this week, setting the tone for the new media sector's performance for the first three months of the year. Marketwatch noted that analysts, for the most part, have suggested in their notes to clients that each of these giants will meet or beat Wall Street's first-quarter expectations. As usual, Yahoo kicks off earnings season tomorrow, expected to report sales growth above 30 percent with a year over year profit fall of 14 percent. eBay is expected to see a 34 percent rise in sales, and …

Return Path is now using a reputation management product that gives companies a "credit score" for their e-mail marketing efforts, according to DM News. Called the Sender Score Reputation Monitor, the new program analyzes more than 60 data points from 50 million e-mail inboxes around the New to quantify a mailer's reputation. These data points include: complaint rates, unknown user rates, security patches, identity stability, and unsubscribe functionality. The aggregated data comes from several Internet service providers and filtering companies, including Cloudmark, Lashback and Mailshell. The product is intended to aid e-mail marketers with their deliverability efforts, and to help …

Internet gambling, even with off-shore betting companies, is now illegal in this country, and so is placing an ad on your site from one these companies. In fact, U.S. authorities have started clamping down on those Web publishers who display casino ads, forcing them to divulge revenues from online casinos and rethink their advertising strategies. Of course publishers think this is unfair, especially when you consider the fact that individual gamblers have very low odds of being prosecuted for betting on these sites. As Wired points out, it's a "largely toothless" law, because so many consumers continually violate it …

Enjoy free municipal Wi-Fi while you can, says Marketwatch's John C. Dvorak, because it ain't gonna last. He argues that cash-strapped cities like San Francisco sooner or later have to succumb to the temptation to charge for Internet services--even if the private companies that install them have no interest in making money. If there's no direct (or indirect) economic benefit for the city, it simply does not make sense to give away free Wi-Fi, he says. Even the myriad coffee shops giving away free Wi-Fi in San Francisco do so for a reason: to encourage customers to stay longer so …

Advertising in video games will be a $2 billion business in four years, says Mitch Davis, the CEO of Massive Incorporated, the young industry's leading seller of so-called dynamic in-game advertising. This would mean that advertising in video games would account for roughly 3 percent of total media spending by 2010. Estimates on in-game ad spending have been all over the place, and Davis' estimate was far larger than forecasts made by media researchers JupiterResearch and The Yankee Group last year, Mediaweek reports. A year after launching the first dynamic in-game ad network, which allows advertisers to buy ads …

The Financial Times spoke with analysts and online executives who claim the Internet is ill-suited for the free, ad-supported online TV services Disney announced this week. Should Disney attract a large audience, other media companies would likely adopt similar strategies, shoring bandwidth and placing the strain squarely on the shoulders of big computer systems and network providers. This could force a new round of spending on a sector that's already strapped for cash. While the Internet is capable of handling downloads from services like iTunes and BitTorrent, analysts note that streaming video is an entirely different process for networks …