The Internet Bubble? A media conspiracy hoax. Don’t blame the entrepreneurs, the venture capitalists, the bankers, the analysts, or the dot-com investors; it’s The Media’s fault. Why? Simple. We got bored. We tired of the latest Windows “upgrade” and Macintosh mess. The idea that we’d have to start covering SAP, PeopleSoft, Baan, and whatever fool notion Larry Ellison got into his well-coiffed head was turning out to be too much for us. So when the Internet came along, we grabbed onto it like a starving vegan grabs on to celery stalk in the middle of the stockyards. It was the …

Ad targeting allows advertisers to reach specific audiences or demographics. This can be done with the use of IP targeting technology or by running your campaigns on subscriber sites which maintain targeting information on their user base. Targeting on subscriber sites almost guarantees that you‘ll reach your intended audience. You can profile on whatever type of data the site collects, job title, salary, age, etc. Your success does depend heavily on the accuracy of the data you’re using, but that can be checked and your campaign specifications adjusted. It‘s always a good idea to fraction off the users who have …

Since we started regularly running the Ad Network Watch on the opposite page, many networks have come and gone. Some lost funding. Some couldn’t drum up enough business to stay afloat. Some altered their business structure. Most networks have enhanced the capabilities of their ad serving technology, using it for their network and licensing it to others. To clarify the Ad Network Watch, we include only impression counts (in column three) for ads delivered by the network into their respective collection of sites. Most of the vendors claim significantly higher impressions served each month, choosing to combine the counts of …

eUniverse is ranked as the No. 1 entertainment site on the net, and one of the top 10 largest properties each week on Nielsen//Netratings. With web content, email newsletters, online greeting cards, and games, the site has one purpose in mind: entertaining the user. Though most websites reach only one or two main age demographics, eUniverse has one of the broadest audiences on the net, ranging from Adults 50+ all the way down to teens, meaning the site is easy enough to use for a novice, but still interesting enough to keep a pro entertained. As a business, …

You’ve seen their virtual ads behind home plate at baseball games on TV, but now Princeton Video Image (www.pvi-inc.com) is going online. Later this year, the company plans to launch iPoint, virtual ads that will be placed in the programs that run on RealNetworks RealPlayers. Since 1997, PVIs have appeared on television, mostly on sporting events where the images look real but are computer generated and aren’t really onsite. The same type of image will appear online, embedded in streams sent to RealPlayers by PVI’s software. Still images and simple animations can run, according to Brown Williams, PVI’s chairman …

StreamingSites Fail in Crisis by Ken Liebeskind, MediaPost Staff Writer Workers sitting in their offices on Sept. 11 without TVs turned to the Internet for live video feeds of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, but many of the sites were down due to overcapacity. When visitors did get to the sites, the stories were slow to load and had been stripped of video content. The situation suggests that streaming news sites can’t handle a national crisis, and yet this crisis was so severe it is perhaps a special case. “In the history of the web, …

Times are tough. As we continue to wade through the economic swamp of abundant layoffs, ever-decreasing budgets, and slashed margins, we also have to contend with a psychological layer—affecting both business and consumer confidence. In this environment, the result is almost always a cost-cutting one. The first budgets to go are usually marketing and specifically adv sing dollars. On the flip side, there is the “Get on with it” factor: Get back to work. Business as usual. Supporting the need to keep up some level of momentum is a wealth of research that suggests that companies who continue to …

One of the biggest stories in the online advertising world in October was the announcement from Interep's Winstar and Cybereps divisions, who said they would no longer accept any Cost Per Action campaigns unless there is a minimum cash guarantee to the rep firms and the sites they represent. We first reported on this in our MediaDailyNews enewsletter on the morning of the release, and almost immediately, my inbox was flooded with reader responses, which at first were almost equally divided on the pros and cons of the announcement. The weightiest argument against CPA pricing came, of course, from Winstar …