Advertisers are desperate to reach 18- to 34-year-old males, because, for more than any other demographic, traditional media just doesn't resonate with this crowd anymore. Luckily, you can find sites like Heavy.com on the Web that are honed specifically for young men. Heavy.com offers animation, music, video games, grainy home movies, super models in bikinis and parodies of pop culture in a series of two-three minute clips. Advertising is ubiquitous, but presented in a manner of "knowing commercialism," in which the site gently makes fun of the fact that it has to support itself with ads, according to The New …

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday in the case involving eBay, a patent dispute with a small company called MercExchange. The high court will consider whether a district court's decision to deny an injunction against eBay's use of the "Buy It Now" feature was correct, as eBay was found to have infringed on MercExchange's patent in using the feature. Both companies are lining up supporting briefs from third parties: the University of California, as well as GE, P&G and a group of venture capitalists have filed briefs in support of MercExhange, while Oracle, Microsoft, and Intel all …

"Old" Web companies are getting into the Voice over Internet Protocol game, coming up with some interesting business models in the hopes of competing in the ever-crowding market. Lycos, the Web-based portal now owned by Spanish telco giant Telefonica SA, is launching a new Windows-based VoIP program that provides free calls to phones when users sign up for promotional offers for credit cards or other services, like the online DVD subscription service Netflix. Lycos' software also shows banner ads. Those who choose not to sign up for the promos will be charged 1 cent a minute for domestic calls. The …

In yet another example of media companies experimenting with user-generated content, Viacom is allowing users to play with its content on The N, a new teen channel Web site, to create video montages they can send to their friends. They've hired an unnamed technology company to develop a video mixer that lets users create so-called video mashups of clips from different shows, according to an entry on the Business 2.0 blog. The blogger reports that it's simple, but provides enough functionality to be fun. Users can pick music tracks, put in transitions between scenes and add graphics. They even sell …

"Even more so in the U.K. than in the U.S., when people think of search, they think of Google," Rand Schulman, WebSideStory, CMO says in a TechWeb News article. His firm, which offers online marketing and analysis technology, recently completed a survey showing that Google carries out three out of every four searches, compared to the U.S., where it typically records a market share of more than 50 percent. "This has huge implications for marketers," Schulman added. Yahoo was a distant second with just 9.3 percent, MSN third with 5.46 percent, AOL fourth, with 4.21 percent, and Ask.com, 2.28 percent.

Ads for large national and global advertisers are starting to pop up next to what you might call "questionable" adult online content. This is strange because advertisers have traditionally been terrified of having their brands associated with anything that might cast them in a less than wholesome light. Is porn going mainstream--or are advertisers not paying attention to exactly where the money spent on a large network buy is going? Two of the brands, AT&T and Apple Computer, were approached by Cnet News.com. Only AT&T responded, saying "It appears the sites in question were part of a large buy vs. …

If you've got a broadband connection, chances are you've been forwarded Internet TV at one time or another. It's the latest rage on the Web: a two to three minute clips of a pair of Chinese students lip-syncing to a popular Backstreet Boys song, or the "Brokeback Mountain" spoof "Brokeback to the Future," in which a series of edits suggests a romance between Doc and Marty McFly. Such video, ranging from the amazing to the hysterically funny to the heart-warming and cute, is changing content on the Web. Sites like YouTube are becoming primary time wasters for teens and twenty …

Only 57 percent of teens aged 13-17 have cell phones, far below the 80 percent of adults who own a mobile phone, but a new study finds that while this group is smaller than the adult one, the attachment its members have to their phones is far greater. Younger users are more likely to use all of the features on their cell phones and they're also more likely to try new offerings like mobile TV. Says one executive from M:Metrics, a company that tracks wireless content and applications, younger phone owners, who have grown up with digital content from birth, …

A new comScore study sponsored by Google attempts to quantify what many retailers already know: that search advertising is a powerful driver of offline sales. Of the 83 million Americans tracked by comScore who searched at one of the top 24 search engines in November and December, 25 percent purchased an item related to their query. Of that number, a 63 percent majority completed the purchase offline. According to a comScore executive, the study makes it clear "that the influence of search on offline buying behavior can often be responsible for the major portion of the overall financial return from …

An LA Times writer discusses the thorny issue of Internet privacy as it relates to Google Earth and Microsoft's new competing map service Windows Live Local. Whereas Google Earth shows still satellite images that are usually a few years old, Windows Live Local is live and in real time. The writer tells the story of a friend taking in a bird's-eye view of his neighborhood in Los Angeles, who found it odd that a bright blue square appeared in his neighbor's backyard, because he didn't think his neighbor had a pool. Sure enough, he got up from his computer, peered …