Articles of the Day
Google Helps Callers Find Themselves With Maps App - Google announced a new version of its popular mobile maps application that includes a new feature giving users their approximate location. The “My Location” feature allows people without GPS-enabled phones to find out where they are by pressing “0″ on their device keypads.
Adobe Taps Yahoo To Serve Ads In PDF Files - Adobe has tapped Yahoo to launch a new contextual ad service for PDF files, giving publishers the option of monetizing their white papers, case studies and other documents with dynamic ads. Called “Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo,” publishers can participate in the beta program for free starting Thursday, while advertisers will be able to buy PDF inventory as part of routine Yahoo Publisher Network buys.
1,500 Web Publishers Join the ADSDAQ Ad Exchange in Only 30 Days - ContextWeb, Inc. announced today that 1,500 web publishers have joined its ADSDAQ(tm) Ad Exchange via the company’s new self-service name-your-price “Selling Desk“ since it was first offered on October 17th. The new web-based offering allows small- and medium-sized content publishers to join the ADSDAQ Exchange in less than five minutes. The additions more than double the number of Web publishers working with ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ to 2,500 (see Table 1 for rankings).
A Bigger Footprint for Engagement: The Value of the Mid-Tail - Online brand advertisers know about the power of engagement–the more time a user spends with a brand the better–and that engagement potential increases with both the size of creative unit and opportunity for interaction. Ideally, advertisers should avail themselves of some of the larger creative units and many emerging forms of integration that take advantage of the unique interactive opportunities of the Web–e.g., home page re-skins, microsites, product placement, advertorials, promotions, etc. But the cost of these results in reducing the overall budget for audience reach.
I Want My…MySpace? - MySpace is bigger and some might say more mature than Facebook, the current rising star of social networking. At the moment, it’s certainly more profitable: This year the News Corp. company is set to rake in $200 to $300 million before interest and taxes on revenue of $800 million. However, MySpace’s user growth is slowing, which means that stickiness, or average time spent per user, has become the key growth metric for the social network moving forward. As it ages, MySpace is starting to look more like MTV and less like a traditional social network.
LinkedIn Worth “A Lot More” Than $1 Billion - Is LinkedIn exploring a possible sale to MySpace parent News Corp.? Dan Nye, the social network’s CEO, doesn’t deny that Rupert Murdoch made an offer, but he maintains that the company’s board is more interested in building LinkedIn than cashing out. “It would take a helluva lot to get us off that path,” Nye says. $1 billion? More than that, he says.
Nearly Now or Never For eBay’s Skype - 2008 could be a “make-or-break-year” for Skype, the voiceover Internet protocol company eBay bought for $2.6 billion two and a half years ago. At the time, the Skype purchase widely regarded as a bizarre deal because many wondered how the online auctioneer planned to integrate an Internet telephony company that offered its services for next to nothing into its online shopping business. In the end (if indeed the marriage is approaching an end), eBay never quite made it work, admitting as much when the company took a $1.4 billion impairment charge on the 2005 acquisition.
