Big Investments at MSN

MSN plans on spending US$500 million on AdCenter, Windows Live and other online services this year to bolster its competitive edge. Advertising revenue on the network declined 3 percent from the same period last year. In fiscal 2006, the unit…

Read More

Retail to Web Inventory

MediaPost reported some interesting comments from Karen Crow, director of sales and operations for Google: "We've been doing a lot of linking with advertisers' back end to find out, for example, what specific products their local store has, and which…

Read More

Click Fraud

Reuters reported that an Arkansas court handed Google a victory last Friday "over disgruntled advertisers who had sued the search engine giant accusing it of trying to drive up fees through so-called click fraud." An independent report was commissioned as…

Read More

June Search Share

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Google grabbed 49.9 percent of searches in June, up 31 percent from the previous year. Yahoo! served 23 percent of searches, up 29 percent from a year earlier, followed by MSN at 10.3 percent, up 3 percent.…

Read More

U.K. Blogs

MSN released some numbers that claim 25 percent of users in Britain are writing blogs. Not surprisingly, the study also suggests the demographics of blog writing skew younger. Forty-two percent of people under 25 regularly update a blog compared with…

Read More

Nine-MSN Chief Hired

The Australian Age reported that Publishing and Broadcasting LTD has hired Tony Faure as chief executive running to run its Nine-MSN Internet property. Mr. Faure most recently sold HomeScreen Entertainment, the online DVD rental he founded, to Quickflix. Previously, Mr.…

Read More

Local.com

Interchange announced that it achieved a positive return on ad spend for the month of June. This goal was highlighted during the company's last earnings call. It means that directionally Local.com is growing traffic and revenue while maintaining costs. CEO…

Read More

PagesJaunes Bidders Emerging

France Telecom's effort to sell off its 54 percent stake in PagesJaunes has reportedly attracted two bidders — Texas Pacific Group and a consortium formed by KKR and Goldman Sachs.Another potential bidder, the French entertainment company Vivendi, has backed off,…

Read More

LiveDeal

LiveDeal announced record growth in June. The site recorded more than 1.4 million unique visitors, with traffic up 34 percent from May. ComScore reported the following growth rates for the Directories/Resources>Classifieds category: Craigslist.org (+11 percent), apartments.com (+8 percent), AutoTrader (-2…

Read More

Google Results

Google announced the results for another stellar quarter today. Second-quarter net income rose 110 percent to US$721 million from US$343 million a year earlier. Revenues increased 77 percent to US$2.46 billion. Google's financial performance was highly anticipated, given the softness…

Read More

Front Page Ads

The Wall Street Journal announced yesterday that as early as September it will sell advertising in the bottom right-hand corner of the front page or in a strip ad along the bottom of the page of the print edition. The…

Read More

PE Goes for Verizon YP

Today there's a report that three private equity firms, including Thomas H. Lee Partners, are gathering to consider a purchase of Verizon's Yellow Pages business. This would be a significant change of plans, since most observers expect the business to…

Read More

It’s New to Us — EMBARQ

The free community newspaper in Princeton, N.J., is called Town Topics. It has been delivered on Wednesdays to every household in town for the past 60 years. Town Topics has great editorial about the Princeton community and is always chock-full…

Read More