Facebook’s new keyword ad system

Facebook has quietly launched a keyword advertising system to rival Google’s AdSense. Disguised as a simple upgrade to Flyers, its system for selling cheap ads on a self-service basis, the new system charges per click and lets advertisers target by city, gender, age, relationship status, employer, educational level, political views, and keywords. Facebook has the data, generated by its users and the new system will have “detailed reporting”.

Is The Standard coming back?

The Industry Standard, my former magazine, appears to be considering re-launching. Its six years since the death of the “newsmagazine of the Internet Economy�, but at least it left a good looking corpse. Many people still respect the kind of in-depth investigate coverage it brought to the Internet industry. Quite why owners IDG are considering bringing it back is beyond me. Time-Warner pulled the plug on Business 2.0, a similar

Notes from Edinburgh TV Unfestival 2007

On the weekend I went to the TV Unfestival, an “unconference” about TV, which is a sort of Fringe even to the Media Guardian TV Festival. Although the event was typical of a tech/geek gathering in the unconference format – lots of healthy debate, discussion and networking – there was often a disparity between the ‘open rights’ and open source culture of the tech world and the locked-down, “copyrighted up

Facebook still running ads on racist groups

Adverts continue to appear beside far-right and racist groups on Facebook despite major advertisers pulling their campaigns following revelations that their brands were appearing alongside such groups. First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, Halifax, AA, and Prudential have already pulled their ads after finding they were appearing next to the far-right BNP party, following a story broken by New Media Age this week. But research by tbites has found that adverts

Facebook on track to overtake MySpace

A Comscore survey of global visitors age 15 and older highlights how Facebook has grown by 270% in the last year, which would put it on track to being larger than MySpace by the end of this year. In North America it has racked up 68.4% of the total unique visits to MySpace’s 62.1%. Facebook only opened its APIs on May 24th, 2007. Comscore said social networking behemoth MySpace.com attracted

Facebook doubles ad rates inside four months

Since February, Facebook has doubled its ad rates for sponsored groups from $150,000 to $300,000 in the US, reports ValleyWag which has obtained Facebook's PowerPoint rate-card deck. Facebook now says it's the top photo site. The minimum sponsorship remains $50,000, and Facebook claims the click-through rate is 20 times that of banners. This higher fee means the number of homepage links and sponsored stories advertisers get also doubles.  

Three signs Aardman for ad-supported videos

UK mobile network Three has signed Aardman Animations, creators of the Wallace and Gromit series of animations, to supply video “snack” content. Has the Aardman’s ‘Angry Kid’ series of video shorts which are paid downloads, but this new package is ad-supported, and will feature old favourites such as Creature Comforts, A Town Called Panic, Purple & Brown and Morph. 3’s ad-supported video service is operated by Rhythm NewMedia. “Launching an

Newser launches human-edited news engine

Newser is a news search engine finessed by human editors. The site has been launched by Patrick Spain, the CEO of Highbeam (cofounder and former CEO of Hoover’s) and journalist Michael Wolff. The mission of the site: “quickly learn more about the most important and most talked about news stories each day, as well as to dig a bit deeper on news topics that interest you.� This is not unlike