Advertising, Online Advertising | featured news

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.

Facebook is so large that it now accounts for about one out of every three ad impressions in the U.S., according to the latest statistics from comScore Ad Metrix. In the first quarter of 2011, comScore estimates that 1.1 trillion ads were served to U.S. Internet users, and 346 billion of those (or 31 percent) were on Facebook.

Spending on U.S. Internet ads rose 15% to $26 billion last year, outpacing traditional media and surpassing newspaper ad revenue for the first time.

In the wake of AOL's deal to buy the Huffington Post, some marketing executives are expressing concerns about the liberal-leaning nature of the website and its potential to taint the broader AOL brand.

Facebook users who check in to a store or click the "like" button for a brand may soon find those actions retransmitted on their friends' pages as a "Sponsored Story" paid for by advertisers....

This year, for the first time, advertisers will have spent more on Internet ads than on print newspaper ads, according to new estimates from eMarketer.

MySpace and some popular applications have been transmitting information to outside advertising companies that could be used to identify users, a Journal investigation found.