No more dropping a card with your name, address, and phone number into a cardboard box with a picture of some Caribbean island on it. Now, you can win prizes by submitting your personal data on a form at one of the many incentives websites. Then, wherever you go on the Internet and shop or click around you’ll be earning credit toward some cool prize. Well, actually, it’s not quite that easy. So how do they do it? The mechanism by which websites usually remember or track a member is a cookie. The problem with cookies is that they …

Founded as a CPC network by Brian Coryat in 1998, ValueClick began offering CPA and CPL pricing models last year and incorporating CPM pricing into the mix this year. ValueClick is a predominantly performance-based network, but offers a full suite of pricing models to its clients. It presently reps 30,000 websites, serves 5.5 billion impressions monthly and has a reach of 1 in 3 households in the United States, Japan, and the UK. Most of ValueClick’s websites are small and medium-sized sites, but according to John Ardis, VP of direct marketing and business development, ValueClick’s focus is on the …

Internet.com is the vast network of Internet and marketing sites published by the INT Media Group. Its E-Commerce/Marketing content channel contains several useful sites for marketers. We have chosen just a few of these to highlight below. CyberAtlas: Internet Statistics and Market Research for Web Marketers offers numerous studies and reports about various sections of the industry, such as finance, wireless, and advertising. The information is clear cut, and the site is easy to navigate. NewMedia is all about what’s next when it comes to the Internet. The site is divided into three categories: Business, Design, and Technology, …

For advertisers, the ultimate promise of digital cable TV is the ability to reach viewers on a one-to-one basis with targeted ads. Each set-top box has a personal ID number that is linked to the cable company’s records, which provide the name and address of customers. Gain permission to merge that with third-party data and you suddenly know more about the customers, so you can target ads to them. A few companies, including Adlink and ACTV, provide targeting services now, although Adlink only works the Los Angeles market. The newest player in the game is Visible World (www.visibleworld.com), a …

StreamingAudio, Video Growth Reported by Ken Liebeskind, MediaPost Staff Writer The growth of streaming advertising is now being documented. DFC Intelligence, a San Diego based research firm, is generating reams of data on the instream audio and video avails being sold by a wealth of sites. The data is proprietary, because DFC sells its research, but it made these general numbers available: •The price of audio and video avails ranges from $25 to $100 CPM, with CNN.com charging the highest rates and sites such as SurferNetwork.com, an Internet radio streamer, charging the lowest. •The average size of a monthly …

By now you’ve heard that the Internet Advertising Bureau has come up with new standards for bigger banners. At first glance, establishing guidelines for seven new ad units, two vertical units, and five large rectangular units seems like a major accomplishment on the IAB’s part. According to the announcement, IAB hoped that this new set of guidelines would “rejuvenate” the online advertising industry, but many saw this as a clear case of “too little, too late.” To everyone’s surprise (yes, I am being sarcastic here), a few weeks after the original release, the IAB announced that according to their …

Have a plan, not just an idea. Too many web companies were founded on a good concept. As we see now, many of them represented potential features in a bigger website, or products/categories better to be sold by a bigger website. There are still questions about some new economy or technology companies as there always will be with start-ups. But those with solid tracks towards profitability and a reason for being should have a good chance of success. Showing up is important. Woody Allen said that 80 percent of success is showing up. That means making meetings on time, …

On September 12th, most of America woke up desperately hoping the previous day’s events were just a bad dream. They weren’t. The images we saw and the sounds we heard were real, and that reality will forever haunt our memories. Now we must raise a flag, just like those three firefighters did in the rubble of the World Trade Center, and try to move on. It will be hard. The media will continue to be full of terror coverage for quite some time, and no matter how hard we try we will never be able to fully recover from the …