Online Advertising

Small businesses have been an elusive market for sellers of online advertising. That's because the value proposition of those ads is a tough sell. Facebook hopes to reduce some of the resistance in the small business community to advertising online with a series of summer boot camps, dubbed "Faceboo...

The market is waiting with bated breath to see the exact size of Alibaba's IPO, but investors in Yahoo, which owns about 23 percent of Alibaba's stock, don't seem impressed. Yahoo's shares closed Wednesday at $34.07, down 6.6 percent. Yahoo's stake is worth about $26 billion based on the fair value ...

Amazon is now allowing consumers to add items to their shopping cart simply by sending a reply on Twitter. Users who connect their accounts on the two services can add a product they see in a Twitter link to their Amazon shopping cart simply by replying to the tweet with the hashtag #AmazonCart -- o...

The White House last week released a review of Big Data and privacy written by counselor John Podesta. The report stems from President Obama's January request to define for the administration what is new about the technologies in this space, how Big Data affects public policy, and how consumer priva...

Google this week updated its terms of service with new language that more clearly spells out how it scans and analyzes user content, such as emails, to match it with targeted ads. "Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such...

Why is question-and-answer website Quora so popular with investors? "Because of the high quality of the discussions on the site," answered Paul Levinson, professor of communications and media studies at Fordham. To get a true expert take on the matter one would have to consult Tiger Global Managemen...

Twitter on Tuesday announced a redesign of its user profiles, hard on the heels of its launch of new photo-sharing capabilities late last month. Included among the new features in the redesign are larger profile photos, customized headers, and an enlarged presentation of tweets that have been partic...

Twitter has bolstered its photo-sharing capabilities with the addition of two new features: the option to add up to four photos per tweet, and a function allowing users to tag up to 10 other people in a photo. Both features are designed to make photos more social. When a user shares multiple photos ...

Bogus web traffic is creating a crisis for advertisers on the Web. Advertisers pay for page views. They assume that those views are tied to living eyeballs. When those views aren't tied to eyeballs -- as when they're generated by automated means -- advertisers can get testy. That's what's starting t...

Google and Viacom have settled a long-running copyright suit, after a federal judge twice threw out the case. "Google and Viacom today jointly announced the resolution of the Viacom vs. YouTube copyright litigation," the companies said in a brief joint statement. "This settlement reflects the growin...

Yahoo and Yelp on Wednesday announced a new partnership to display Yelp ratings with Yahoo's search results, a move designed to snag some market share from Yahoo's larger search competitors. Now, when someone uses Yahoo to search for a local business, that business' Yelp rating will pop up in the ri...

Getty Images, the stock photo giant that many professional photographers loathe but amateurs love, on Thursday announced it will allow consumers to embed and share its images free for non-commercial purposes on blogs, social networks and other websites. The move indicates the company, whose batter...

CEO Satya Nadella has begun his much-anticipated shakeup of Microsoft's leadership ranks, just weeks after taking the helm. Tony Bates, EVP of business development and evangelism, and Tami Reller, EVP of marketing, are on the way out. Eric Rudder, EVP of advanced strategy, will take over Bates' duti...

Google on Friday announced its purchase of online ad fraud fighter Spider.io. It initially will include Spider's fraud detection technology in its video and display ad products. Over time, Google will incorporate Spider's iFramed ads view technology in its products. Its long-term goal is "to improve...

Mozilla on Tuesday gave its users a heads-up that their browsers would be getting a new feature called "Directory Tiles." Aimed at new or infrequent Firefox users, Directory Tiles fills what has been empty online real estate on the Firefox browser. A new user logging in, or a user returning to the b...