Janis Mara

Yahoo! Wednesday reported soaring revenue and earnings in line with expectations for the fourth quarter, with its search and marketplace properties getting the credit along with the overall recovery of interactive advertising and the acquisition of Overture. “Two years ago we had no sponsored search listings. Today they account for 60 percent of our revenues, […]

Shopping.com has plugged into Internet yellow pages publisher Switchboard Inc.’s local search system to promote its comparison-shopping service. Coming off a banner 2003 holiday season in which its unique visitors doubled to 58 million, Shopping.com has integrated links to its site into Switchboard’s yellow pages listings. Within appropriate categories, a yellow box appears below Switchboard’s […]

As Web surfers endeavor to grow thin, the hit counters of health, fitness and nutrition sites get fat, with over 11 million home surfer visits during the week ending Jan. 4, according to online audience measurement firm Nielsen//Net Ratings. “Traditionally, this is a busy month for health clubs, and we’re seeing this online as well,” […]

Almost as soon as the President signed the Can Spam act last month, companies leapt at the chance to position themselves as compliance experts. After all, there is money to be made by helping e-mail marketers meet the new law’s requirements. “With fines that can run to $6 million and a couple years in prison, […]

Users tired of e-mail addresses such as “john3917654@earthlink.com” have a chance to create new identities — America Online is offering e-mail addresses for common names such as “bob@netscape.com” via an eBay auction promoting its new low-cost dial-up Internet service. The charity auction is a major element of a year-long, multimillion-dollar ad campaign that launched Thursday […]

Consumer anti-spam e-mail company Mailblocks is having a busy New Year, acquiring e-mail provider EmailAccount.com, launching a free, ad-supported e-mail service and retaining Adtegrity.com and ValueClick Media to sell inventory it hopes to generate. The flurry of changes comes at a difficult time for Mailblocks, whose legendary founder, Phil Goldman, died on Christmas day. Rich […]

After notching 50 percent revenue growth in its advertising business in the past year, Microsoft’s MSN is trying to keep it up, including new offerings for advertisers in its just-launched version of the ISP service. The company’s also working to please consumers it’s been losing to broadband, rolling out new broadband-oriented features, as well as […]

Raising the bar (and the billboard) on potentially embarrassing dating experiences, Yahoo! Personals is launching an interactive ad campaign featuring live video feeds of a member’s dates on a Sunset Strip billboard in Los Angeles. The multimillion-dollar campaign launches Wednesday, lasts all year and features banner ads on Yahoo! and iVillage. The ads use actual […]

Yahoo!’s Overture Services will hand more control to advertisers later this month, letting them bid for contextual listings independently from search listings. Received wisdom in the industry contends that users are less likely to purchase goods or services after clicking on contextual ads, which appear on content pages, as compared to those that appear on […]

There’s no place like gnome, or home, anyway, and veteran travel site Travelocity is hoping to regain its home turf on top of the travel rankings with a campaign involving a purloined gnome. The $80 million campaign began Dec. 15 with a three-week pre-campaign revolving around a Web site, www.whereismygnome.com, with the objective of “generating […]

Auto enthusiasts who attend the North American International Auto Show, kicking off this week in Detroit, may be part of a dying breed. Jupiter Research predicts that more than a third of all new car sales will be “Internet-generated” by 2008. In other words, more and more people will make their buying decisions because of […]

As the eggnog flowed and the Christmas lights sparkled, many online marketers may have lost track of legislative events, specifically the 2003 passage of some new online privacy laws in California with far-reaching implications. The two most relevant laws to online marketing are SB 27 and AB 68. The first, SB 27, mandates that consumers […]