advertising

As Opera announced today, it has purchased privately held US company AdMarvel , Mobile Advertising Company , that has developed a product suite that manages how ads are delivered to mobile phones, for $ 8 million.

Meantime, Opera is paying up to an additional $15 million if certain financial targets are met during the next 24 months, according to a filing with the Oslo Børs.

Opera has already been using AdMarvel's product suite when testing mobile advertising on its Mini browser and was delighted with the results.

Facebook, with 350 million users overall, is the premier destination for marketers in the U.S. and many worldwide markets. It will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenue in 2010, per eMarketer.
In total, marketers will spend $2.2 billion to advertise on social networks worldwide in 2009, with $1.2 billion in spending in the U.S. In 2010, Facebook will account for nearly one-quarter of all social network ad spending worldwide, up from 20 percent in 2009.

Blue Destiny Records, a mini music label, accuses Google and Microsoft of linking with file sharing sites. the search giants are allegedly "facilitating and enabling" the illegal distribution of copyrighted songs.

The lawsuit was filed Monday with a US federal court in Northern Florida. This suit appeared to be an attempt to choke off the distribution of Blue Destiny tunes on the file-sharing service RapidShare.

Monday, the Federal Trade Commission held a conference to discuss guidelines on how companies collect and store vast amounts of data about consumers for very little money to use it for advertising.

 As FTC reported, there are little in the way of legal requirements to protect consumer information.

How often you feel that your project is the best one and it deserves general recognition? Probably every day, every moment... Now you have a chance to tell the whole world about your project, and do it not in front of a small audience but before thousands of the Ecommerce Journal readers.  

 A pending non-provisional utility patent application assigned to Apple Computer published. This application is titled Advertisement in Operating System, and covers an operating system that is capable of displaying a variety of advertisements to users.

 Google Inc's growth machine is back in gear.

The world's No. 1 search engine not only posted higher-than-expected third-quarter profits and revenues, but also said it was looking for major acquisitions and could buy a large company "maybe every year or two."

"While there is a lot of uncertainty about the pace of economic recovery, we believe the worst of the recession is behind us and now feel confident about investing heavily in our future," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Thursday.

With millions of Internet users spending their time and money on the web, contextual advertising appears to be a really attractive alternative to offline marketing. The best thing about contextual advertising is that online ads are placed on the sites with relevant content, so that visitors are more likely to click the ad, buy the product or even become repeat customers. So, how does it all work?

 Spending on Internet advertising in Britain grew 4.6 percent in the first half of 2009, outperforming the wider ad sector, which slumped 17 percent, and making it the country's biggest ad medium ahead of TV.

According to the biannual report from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), ad spend on the Internet grew to 1.75 billion pounds, with the medium accounting for 23.5 percent of all spend, ahead of television for the first time.

According to Click Forensics data, the practice of generating counterfeit charges to pay-per-click advertisers by imitating the clicks of real users, known as click fraud, reflected considerable decline in the first half of 2009. 

After two years of worldwide rates hovering steadily around or above 15%, Click Forensics reported a decrease to 13.8% in the first quarter of 2009 and a further decline to just 12.7% the second quarter.