WebProNews

Banner Ads Used as Hacker Tools

Legitimate sites and their users have been dealing with a rash of malware being spread by banner ads, from Monster to MLB (Major League Baseball) NHL (National Hockey League) and other sites that are delivering malware. While the Monster dot com exploit is well known news, the MLB and NHL sites are not well known, but used a similar way of purchasing advertising on a web site, and then using that advertising to deliver malware to customers as shown in the video below.

Blogs Trusted More Than Search, Banner, and Text

Consumer-generated content is by far a more trusted form of advertising worldwide than search engine ads, banner ads, or text ads, according to Nielsen, and is trusted almost as much as physical word-of-mouth.

YouTube Ads (The Aftermath)

YouTube finally unveiled the first real version of its a platform last week, and we’re still processing the results. Some stories:

Banner Blindness Beyond the Banner

When looking at the difference between a profitable business model and an unprofitable one you really need to look at the math. I recently ran many graphic ads that I bought through Google on a CPM site targeting basis. Here is a look at one campaign:

YouTube Goes Retro With Banner Ads And Pop-Ups

When Google bought YouTube, the second question people asked (after "what about the copyright nightmare?) was about how Google planned to introduce advertising into a pure video vacuum. YouTubers have never been keen on being sold anything, not even Paris Hilton.

Google Top Ads - Was Banner Blindness Setting In?

Google refers vaguely to the "need for a new look" in shifting their top sponsored ad background color from blue to yellow today. Were CTR's declining? We know that rotating ad design in banner campaigns sometimes props up CTR's. Personally, I haven't seen much evidence of declining CTR up there at the top, but you never know.

AdSense Lets You Play Your Own Video Ads

A bit of a good thing for AdSense publishers: If you see a video AdSense ad appearing on your website, you can feel free to play it.

Banner Ad Success and Contextual Improvement

Seth Godin gives us an anecdote from Usama Fayyad of Yahoo about a study that showed that contextual text ads saw a 249% increase click-through rate increase after a corresponding banner campaign was run.

YouTube Confessions

Is it wrong that at night, when I'm alone in my apartment, I'm scouring Popurls.com for the top YouTube posts and searching uncontrollably for Maury Povich's show on Pickle Phobia?

Study: Web Users Blind to Banner Ads

ClickZ looks at a new study from the Nielsen/Norman Group which finds internet users still suffer from "banner blindness"; the condition that rich media advertisers find most annoying.