If they have a choice 72 percent of Internet users would favor viewing ads to pay for Web content instead of paying to access content according to a Direct Marketing Association study.

A company with “soft” in its name might be tempting fate – poor financial performances would be all too appropriate.  Softbank isn’t having that problem, though, and instead, the Japanese telecommunications giant saw its net profits rise by 221 percent over a certain period.

The conversation targeting approach Buzzlogic has been testing allows a campaign manager to put relevant advertising in front of the influencers, inlinkers, and their audiences when key topics appear.

Telemundo has announced that it will make entire episodes of its prime-time shows and novelas available on Yahoo Telemundo Web site the morning after the original broadcast.

Ask the average person about ads, and they’ll think of television commercials.  Mention computers, and they’ll move on to text ads.  But a new report from Forrester Research suggests that video ads deserve attention, too, because as much as $7.1 billion might be spent on them by 2012.

The number of U.S. adults who are online has increased ten percent in the past year, amounting to an estimated 178 million online users according to a new poll from Harris Interactive.

When watching a movie in a public theater, it’s usually best not to talk.  But when watching online videos in your own home, there’s no reason not to, and Joost and Meebo have just partnered to provide a new communication option.

Five major newspaper publishers may be ready to create a national ad network that will let them keep all of their ad revenue in-house.

So, what’s it going to be?  Spend the time and effort cultivating your organic search engine marketing plan or just offer up the cash and invest in a pay-per-click program? Which is better for you?  Both?

Instead of generating and copy/pasting new code with each color or channel change for an ad unit, the AdSense team has rolled out a better way to do this.

The ancient question about the chicken or the egg coming first applies to Yahoo’s latest service, a college student and alumni social networking site called Kickstart.

The latest print copy of Rolling Stone also appears in a free online version, the first time the magazine has created a full digital issue.

A sample of a spam message making the rounds demonstrated how someone used a Google URL, with advanced search operators, to send people to a fake retail site. It could be much worse.

With all the big announcements

By all accounts, Radiohead’s name-your-own-price album was downloaded millions of times.  No one’s sure how much people paid, however.  And although the Wikimedia Foundation has apparently received over 14,000 donations, the dollar value of those gifts remains unknown.

National Public Radio has launched its own music site NPR Music.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is a venture capital firm that’s played a large role in the development of companies like Google, Amazon, and Sun Microsystems.  And now the backer of these winning corporations wants nothing to do with Web 2.0.

On the one hand, new data makes it surprising that Google doesn’t cater more to the French market.  On the other hand, perhaps the search giant doesn’t need to – in France, it already has a market share of almost 90 percent.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer defended his company’s purchase of a 1.6 percent stake in social network Facebook for $240 million.

Snap.com will today announce the launch of its Snap Shots Ad Network. You may recall that Snap offers the link mouse-over pop-ups–briefly tested by us last year–designed to show you the location of a link before you actually click on it.

Anyone who was still holding out for an antigravity/invisibility/teleportation device in the form of a forthcoming Gphone is in for a disappointment; Google has (re)confirmed that it will not be producing such a product.  But Google did discuss some other mobile plans that it feels are quite important.