The video game industry in May failed to top $1 billion in sales for the first time since August 2007, providing yet more evidence that the industry is far from immune to the economic recession. According to market research firm NPD Group, total sales reached $863.3 million for the month. Console sales were particularly disappointing, dropping 30% to $302.5 million from $433 million in May 2008. Sales of Nintendo's Wii dropped by more than half, according to the report. "The hardware decline is the most troubling," said Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter, "because that sets us …

"Google can't seem to make a go of it anywhere else in the ad world," says BusinessWeek's Rob Hof. The search giant tried and failed to sell print and radio ads, shuttering both projects earlier this year, and its TV ad effort has been slow. Meanwhile, the economy has hit its main business, paid search, which slowed to 6% revenue growth in the first quarter of this year. Despite these recent disappointments, Hof says that Google is now redoubling its efforts to grab a bigger piece of the display ad market, which accounts for more than a …

Dell on Thursday reported that its Twitter followers have brought the company more than $3 million in sales by clicking through to its Web sites to make purchases. The company has been posting tweets for about two years now and tracks sales with proprietary software. However, as Reuters points out, $3 million in sales over two years is "a pittance" for Dell, which posted $12.3 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2009, alone. That said, yesterday's report marks Dell as one of the first examples of how companies might profit from Twitter, which currently does …

Much has been made of the vanity URLs auction that will take place on Facebook at 12:01 AM tonight. At that time, users will start scrambling to claim unique user names and their corresponding URL (facebook.com/username). URLs will be given away for free on a first-come, first-serve basis. However, SAI's Nicholas Carlson thinks the social networking giant is passing up a golden revenue-generating opportunity. Earlier this week, he chided Facebook for giving away for free something it could have charged users and companies at least $5 per year for. It turns out that Facebook originally planned to …

The American Cable Association is targeting Internet content providers who plan to charge ISPs subscription fees for content, saying that their plan to do so could "cripple" the nation's goal to deliver broadband to every household, Multichannel News reports. According to Matt Polka, President of the organization, which represents small to mid-sized cable operators, the FCC and parties involved in the net neutrality debate "should be concerned that Web-based content and service providers...will drive up the retail cost of broadband access and drive down new adoption rates." ESPN, which charges ISPs for carrying its content site ESPN360.com, …

For developers of corporate software, the abundance of choice is "a double-edged sword," says BusinessWeek's Steve Hamm, because they simply can't afford to create different versions of their applications for every kind of phone. Focus on the wrong device, and they waste time and money. It follows, therefore, that developers will have a major say in which companies dominate mobile computing, Hamm says, because businesses will gravitate to those devices with the best applications and security for corporate customers. It's very early days in this arms race, but Hamm says that RIM, Microsoft and Apple look like …

While the news media continues its love affair with Twitter, Compete reports that the microblogging service suddenly stopped growing in May. According to the research firm's May data, Twitter registered a slight 1.47% increase in monthly visitors compared to April, totaling 19,728,619 uniques. Total visits, however, were up a healthy 6.9% to 134,536,240. Compete's numbers can't be considered completely accurate, but they are corroborated by similar findings from Quantcast, which actually showed a dip in monthly uniques for the hot Web startup. Meanwhile, YouTube and Facebook continue their growth trajectory. Compete's data shows a minor decline in …

Last year, IAC/InterActive Corp. CEO Barry Diller split his oversize media conglomerate into five separate publicly traded businesses, with IAC remaining focused primarily on Web media brands like Citysearch, Match.com, Evite and Ask. Speaking at an industry conference Diller explained the reasoning behind the move: "We built up a fairly large number of disparate businesses," he said. "All of them had some form of interactivity, but they were all from selling mortgages to dating...It wasn't giving investors or commentators or anyone else a clear picture of what the company was." Diller also declared that solely relying on …