News media outlets used to compete for the best stories and photographs to attract large audiences. Now, with the explosion of news on the Web, newspaper companies are competing with Web-based news pubs, bloggers and social networks. The world's reading audience may be greater, but a more fragmented ad pie means the competition for eyeballs is fiercer. Nowhere is this more evident than in search-engine marketing, where buyers bid against each other to attract readers to their site by paying for clicks. The New York Times Co. only started doing this three years ago, but now it buys tens …

Display networks are the new online video-for now. Now that Yahoo has all of Right Media and Google is on the verge of scoring DoubleClick, everyone's waiting for the next big move. Microsoft is now said to be after ValueClick Media, one of the Web's largest ad networks, along with 24/7 Real Media and aQuantive, owner of the ad-server AtlasDMT. Why ad nets? According to eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman, display ads are on course to reach $5.5 billion this year. That's about $3 billion less than the market search-related text ads. And when you consider that search accounted …