It's not news that counting Web traffic isn't an exact science. If you're a Web publisher, you know that Nielsen//NetRatings, comScore and Alexa may have vastly different things to say about your Web audience. That flies in the face of the impression that online advertising is the most dependably trackable ad medium of all time. But that's not stopping Google from buying a startup like YouTube for its high-volume traffic. Nielsen and comScore, the top two companies in Web measurement, employ consumer panels from a cross-section of the American public. They record the Web movements of real people and …

Media companies are setting up shop in Second Life, the virtual online world developed by Linden Lab and created by its users. Over the past month, Wired magazine, CNET Networks and Reuters have set up virtual offices in the online world, where many real people earn a living. That major businesses are entering Second Life is testament to its surging popularity. Linden Lab says Second Life is growing at about 38 percent month over month, and expects to add between 200,000 and 250,000 new players this month--an accelerated pace that MySpace would be proud of. "Second Life is …

Here's a healthy dose of reality for Web publishing startups: The top 10 Internet ad sellers control 71 percent of the online ad market, according to numbers from the IAB/PricewaterhouseCoopers. Online advertising is making many Web publishers rich, but for every Google or YouTube, there are hundreds of Web sites that won't attract enough traffic to survive. That brings to mind the late '90s, when lots of Web companies tried to stake their future on online advertising--and failed. Of course, back then, connection speeds were slow, and ad technologies undeveloped. Now, online advertising is proven--but the content, in many …

If there are real, thriving virtual economies, it means people are making money in massively multiplayer online role-playing games, like Second Life and World of Warcraft. That means the U.S. government has every right to tax those earnings. "You could argue that to a certain degree, the law has fallen (behind) because you can have a virtual asset and virtual capital gains, but there's no mechanism by which you're taxed on this stuff," said Dan Miller, senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress. "Right now, we're at the preliminary stages of looking at the …

News Corp., General Electric's NBC Universal and Viacom, Inc. are banding together to mount a potential lawsuit against Google, Inc. and its new acquisition, YouTube. This might be a negotiating tactic by the media companies to ensure that Google cuts them a favorable deal, but according to the group's lawyers, YouTube could be liable for copyright penalties of $150K per unauthorized video. Viacom, for example, believes that video clips from its channels--including MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon--are watched 80,000 times a day on YouTube. That adds up to billions, if you do the math. The legal maneuvering comes as …

Add Time Warner to the list of media companies that could bring legal action against Google, now that the search giant has acquired YouTube. Time Warner, whose media properties include Warner Brothers and HBO, is one of several major content producers whose material is uploaded illegally every day on the viral video site. Dick Parsons, the company's CEO, says: "You can assume we're in negotiations with YouTube and that those negotiations will be kicked up to the Google level in the hope that we can get to some acceptable position. ... If you let one thing ignore your rights …

In an interview with Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, post-YouTube, the British paper wanted to know how the company justified paying $1.65 billion for a company that had yet to earn a dime. Schmidt's answer: We have the best advertising system in the world--and soon, we'll be able to apply it to video, too. "The real reason," he added, "was not the money, and not even the advertising--it was because we believe that video is going to be, and is sort of already, one of the most important new media types on the Internet." But isn't everyone trying to move …

If you're a marketer, sometimes you have to think in terms of stereotypes and over-simplifications to deliver the right message for your brand--and protect it from appearing in the wrong place. Therefore, you have to think that MySpace is a place for dirty old men to prey on young people, YouTube is a place to watch ripped-off videos, and Facebook is where minors go to see photos of their underage drinking exploits. User-generated content is dangerous territory precisely because users can create their own uncensored content. But that's what you do at these user-generated sites, so that's what marketers …

Dallas Mavericks owner and dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban, who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for some $5 billion during the height of the dot-com madness, says that a bubble is now being created in online video advertising. He says there are too many players out there that value themselves very highly, but there will never be enough ad dollars to feed everyone. Says Cuban: "Everyone is chasing broadband video ad money from agencies. It's the hot-dollar right now." This year, venture capitalist firms have spent a total of $521 million funding 53 different online video companies, up from $294 million …

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on the corporate relations warpath in New York this week in an attempt to assure its traditional media company partners that YouTube, the company's $1.65 billion acquisition, will not turn into a content competitor. Schmidt, fresh from a meeting in Los Angeles with Rupert Murdoch and other News Corp. executives, arrived in New York Thursday to meet with top executives from Time Warner, Viacom, CBS and other big content companies. In an interview with the Financial Times, Schmidt reiterated that the YouTube purchase was all about expanding Google's ability to distribute ads across the Web. …