Online Advertising | featured news

Competition's all relative. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL all compete for ad dollars, but they all agree that marketers ought to put their budgets into premium content, not search or social.

Rapper Snoop Dogg gave props on Twitter to an ad for the Toyota Sienna minivan. Actress Tori Spelling linked to a website for rental cars. And reality TV star Khloe Kardashian soliloquized about the brand of jeans that accentuates the famous Kardashian derriere.

Internet company Yahoo Inc. has agreed to buy online advertising network Interclick Inc. for $270 million in cash. The deal announced Tuesday is expected to help Yahoo target advertisements to its online audience. Interclick's technology will allow Yahoo to "to expand its targeting and data capabilities to deliver campaigns" more effectively, Yahoo said.

Chinese search engine Baidu reports an 80% surge in profits for the third quarter, boosted by increased advertising sales.

Google’s core business, search advertising, seems so far to have weathered the economic doldrums that have hurt other sites and publications relying on ads.

As search spending continued to rise in the just-ended third quarter, Google regained market share lost during the last couple of quarters to Microsoft's Bing search engine, according to a new report to be released Tuesday morning by Efficient Frontier, which manages about $1 billion in search, display, and social advertising for agencies and advertisers. ...

Facebook's first-half revenue roughly doubled to $1.6 billion, underscoring the world's largest social network's appeal to advertisers.

Google Inc will pay $500 million to settle government charges that it showed ads for pharmacies that operate illegally, regulators are expected to announce on Wednesday, according to a report in the New York Times.

ComScore and Nielsen are introducing rating systems for Facebook, to help advertisers better compare the social-networking site to traditional advertising outlets such as TV and print.

To win in the fast-growing digital-advertising market, Web companies such as Facebook, Google and Groupon are increasingly wooing mom-and-pop businesses.