What keeps WPP Chief Executive Martin Sorrell awake at night? Google. In fact, Sorrell is so familiar with the online advertising giant, he's committed its revenue and market capitalization to memory. Google is currently worth $180 billion, with expected 2008 revenues of $22 billion. Meanwhile, WPP Group, Omnicom, Interpublic and Publicis-the four largest ad agency holding companies-have a combined market cap of $45 billion, on combined revenue of about $33 billion. "So (Google has) two thirds of the revenues and their market cap is almost four times bigger than the top four advertising companies," Sorrell says. "The market is …

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that monetizing YouTube is priority No.1 for the search king this year, but nearly six months into '08, it's the same old story for the online video sharing giant: Sustained market domination but puny revenues. The company's latest money-saving idea: let content creators sell their own ads. That's right, professional content producers are now able to sell ads on their own branded YouTube channels, but they still have to split revenues with the video sharing giant just as before. Ad units on YouTube include display units on the page and expandable overlays that run …

Behavioral targeting holds great promise, but attempts to sneak it through the back door threaten to undermine the promising advertising technology. Specifically, The Economist is referring to the new rush of "opt-out" behavioral targeting systems being deployed by British and American ISPs. You may have heard of Phorm and NebuAd, companies whose technologies collect keywords from user surfing behavior in order to deliver targeted, relevant advertising. Phorm and NebuAd then share the ad revenue with the ISPs. Many regulators don't like this approach to targeted advertising, particularly because users have to opt-out of having these systems track their Web …

Silicon Alley Insider's Yahoo shareholder Henry Blodget explains why he and his colleagues don't need seven weeks to decide whether to vote for Jerry Yang and the existing Yahoo board or Carl Icahn and his proxy slate. "We're voting for Jerry," he said, not because Jerry and co. played the Microsoft thing correctly (they didn't), but more because Carl Icahn's whole proxy fight is based on the presumption that once he has control of the Web giant, he can sell it to Microsoft for $33 per share. That strategy, Blodget said, is a "Hail Mary" at best, because "if we …

The New York Post says that Madison Avenue, in particular, is anxiously awaiting the arrival of Apple's new 3G iPhone, hoping the new handset will change the way people use their phones, enabling mobile marketing to finally come good on its promise. So drastically did the first iPhone change user consumption habits, that some advertisers even developed iPhone-specific campaigns. But in the end, the phone's speed proved to be prohibitively slow. Now, analysts are pretty sure that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will unveil a new high-speed 3G model at an Apple conference next week. The upgrade will make it …

Application makers on Facebook and MySpace are starting to compete with the mother site for ad dollars, The Wall Street Journal reports. Backed by a hefty dose of venture capital and under pressure to find new ways to make money, companies like RockYou and iLike are hiring teams to sell ads on the applications they build. In many cases, the sellers are going after the very same advertisers as Facebook and MySpace. Social networking sites say they're happy their partners are finding ways to support their businesses, but The Journal points out that the addition of application makers to the …