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Facebook folds under pressure

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Facebook is feeling a little broken over its unsuccessful attempt to invade the privacy of its members.

The New York Times reported Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial advertising scheme named Beacon is met with several protests from groups like MoveOn.org. More than 50,000 people have signed the petition to modify this advertising system and uphold consumer privacy.

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The new ad system is a sly version of word-of-mouth marketing. When users who are logged into Facebook visit a participating site, their friends can now view those actions through News Feed or Mini-Feed stories.

Given these protests, Facebook agreed to make a very important change – it will now ask for the members’ explicit approvals before they track their online activities.

As posted in the Caucus, here are some other changes:

  1. Users must click on “O.K.” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.
  2. If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published. When a user takes a future action on a Beacon site, it will reappear and display all the potential stories along with the opportunity to click “O.K.” to publish or click “remove” to not publish.

Originally posted on November 30, 2007 @ 10:47 am

Adobe, Yahoo! partner on PDF ads

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adobe adsSoon, Adobe PDF files will no longer be free from online advertising. Adobe Systems has partnered with Yahoo! to provide publishers the option to serve contextually relevant ads to their PDF files.

Dubbed as Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo, these ads aims will only appear on the right side panel so it will not get in the way of the content. Under this agreement, pay-per-click revenues will be shared with Adobe, Yahoo! and interested content publishers.

To join the program, publishers must register online, and then simply upload their Adobe PDF content so that it can be ad-enabled before distributing PDFs as they do today. Ads can only be displayed within Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat, in a panel adjacent to the content so that they do not disrupt the viewing experience. Every time the PDF content is viewed, contextual ads are dynamically matched to the content of the document.

“By partnering with Yahoo! on this innovative advertising service we are creating opportunities for publishers to build new businesses around unique content that previously was just given away or not available to a mass online audience,” said Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president, Corporate Development at Adobe.

For now, this ad-system works only for U.S.-based publishers.

Originally posted on November 29, 2007 @ 3:48 am

Doubleclick delivers new widget-based ad operations dashboard

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doubleclick.pngDoubleClick Inc. announced the availability of the DART for Publishers (DFP) Dashboard, an innovative, time-saving solution for ad operations professionals. The new DFP Dashboard combines Web 2.0 flexibility, intuitive functionality and vivid graphical displays – transforming common advertising operations tasks such as monitoring campaign performance and troubleshooting delivery issues. With the DFP Dashboard, information is presented in customizable tools called widgets designed to enable users to configure their dashboards to show the information most relevant to their role. This new tool is fully integrated with DFP and included at no additional cost to all existing DFP users.

Existing widgets include Ad Delivery, My Orders, Troubleshooting Tools, Deep Links, and more. The Dashboard also includes an RSS-based messaging platform for keeping customers up-to-date with important ad serving news, events, and system alerts. This powerful collection of customizable widgets makes it easy for publishers to proactively troubleshoot and fix campaign problems, helping to save time and increase efficiency and client satisfaction. For example, the new Troubleshoot Ads widget gives customers direct access to advanced diagnostic tools previously only available to DoubleClick’s own support engineers.

Originally posted on November 27, 2007 @ 11:30 am

Online newspaper advertising continues to grow

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new media newsIn the latest preliminary estimates from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), advertising expenses on newspapers Web sites reached $773 million or 21.1 percent growth this 3rd quarter.

Advertising on this medium already shares 7.1 percent of the total newspaper ad spending. This is also the 14th consecutive quarter it registered a double digit growth, starting last 2004.

Even this impressive performance was not enough to cushion the decline in total ad spending at newspaper companies, which was down by 7.4% or $10.1 billion. This is mainly caused by the slow down in print ad spending.

Most major sub-categories under printed ads also weakened – classified ads (-17%), retail (-4.9%), and national (-2.5%).

“Newspaper Web sites continue to generate substantial revenue by offering advertisers access to the nation’s most desirable group of consumers,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm. “At the same time, broader economic issues are impacting our industry the same way they are impacting other media – the continued fallout from declines in the housing market clearly affects real estate, recruitment and retail advertising. Newspaper companies continue to take aggressive measures to prepare for the future during a period of economic challenges for the industry.”

Originally posted on November 23, 2007 @ 8:01 am

AOL introduces video ticker ads

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aol.pngAOL announced the availability of video ticker ads, a new interactive video advertising solution that serves as a creative alternative to pre-roll ads that was developed in conjunction with PointRoll, the leading provider of rich media technology solutions.

AOL’s video ticker ad is a graphic banner ad that is integrated within a streaming video, but without obstructing the video viewing experience. When clicked on by a consumer, the ticker expands to launch a video ad, or an interactive Flash ad, within the video player window. These ads will run across the AOL Network of premium video content within the newest version of the AOL Video media player platform.

Also released with the video ticker ads is a newly revamped media player platform which introduces several new and improved features, including:

• A single flexible experience: Sharing and social utilities – such as email, bookmarking and related videos – are available from the player view port;

• Multiple monetization options: New ad inventory includes 300 x 250 interstitials, video ticker ads and synched text ads;

• A new user interface and development framework: The new UI streamlines the control set and improves customization options, while the new development framework simplifies adding new features.

Originally posted on November 19, 2007 @ 8:36 am