The consensus among online marketers and publishers is that clicks and CPMs don't effectively measure a brand advertising campaign's performance. In the meantime, the online ad industry is searching for a metric to capture "engagement," but so far, none of the various parties have been able to agree on a standard measuring unit. As PaidContent's Tameka Kee notes, publishers are churning out stats like time spent, return visits, and the number of times a brand gets mentioned in social media comments as proof of why advertisers should pay more for their inventory.Part of the problem, she says, is …

The ecosystem of game developers and other companies supplying services to Facebook users could generate as much as $500 million in revenue in 2009, or about as much as Facebook itself is projected to make, says VentureBeat's Eric Eldon. This is fairly significant, considering that many have viewed Facebook apps as "gimmicks making no significant revenue." That said, the numbers are very difficult to come by, as we're talking about an ecosystem of mostly small private companies that aren't willing to disclose what they're making. "Much of what I've heard is based on triangulating between sources," says Eldon. "Everything here …

Google may not be going through a re-org on the same scale as Yahoo, but there's been plenty of turnover in the company's ad operations of late. One SAI source describes Google's ad ops as "pretty fragmented." Here's a recap of the latest moves: Google's longtime global sales boss Omid Kordestani has now transitioned into an advisory role, replaced by former president of international operations, Nikesh Arora. In March, former North American sales boss Tim Armstrong left to become CEO of AOL; he was replaced by European sales head Dennis Woodside. Following Armstrong to AOL is Jeff …

For the likes of Forbes, Fortune and BusinessWeek, cutting staff and frequency look like near certainties. But does this mean that these magazines can no longer afford to produce the long-form investigative stories that are their hallmark? Not necessarily, says TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy. Here's how these publications can maintain their roots while still competing with blogs and Web pubs: "ruthlessly collapse" the print and online versions into one unit, churn out one or two cover-length pieces per print issue while filling the rest with the best stories and user comments from the Web. Then, Lacy says, they should cut the …

"It was bound to happen," says Fortune's Jia Lynn Yang. "Google couldn't get this dominant -- currently at 76% of the search market -- without attracting some attention from DC." But the question remains whether the company has played by the rules in coming to dominate search. "The last thing the 'do no evil' company wants is a rehash of Microsoft's situation in the 1990s," Yang says. Of course, Google thinks it has played by rules. It maintains that competition is still "just one click away," which is to say there's nothing really preventing users from switching to …

Pandora, a streaming Internet radio service, still mainly makes its money through advertising, but TechCrunch's MG Siegler notes that the company's biggest growth driver is increasingly song referrals that spur downloads on services like Apple's iTunes or Amazon's MP3 service. According to Pandora's CTO Tom Conrad, users are buying a million songs a month now from affiliate links; about 20% of those come directly from Pandora's iPhone app. Says Siegler, "That's really impressive considering that (the iPhone is) just one phone that a relatively small percentage of their users use." However, when you look at a few stats, it …

Google continues to face government scrutiny as it increases its dominance of the search market. A few legal experts think this is a dangerous thing. Evan Stewart of Zuckerman Spaeder LLP points out that high tech is one of the few areas where the U.S. remains a world leader, but care needs to be taken to ensure that the market remains competitive. "The point is that if we're going to maintain that competitive position, it can't be because we allow one entity to become a complete monopolist," Stewart said. Among other investigations, the Department of Justice is currently looking …