Michael Wolff:

Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.<p>

Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

A dramatic exposition of what happens when growing inventory (space to put ads in) meets limited advertising numbers. Extreme, but none of it seems impossible.

It’s no <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/who_uses_pinterest.php">Pinterest</a>, but according to data from now Google-owned Admob, iPhone users were split pretty evenly along gender lines in February of 2010, with women accounting for 43% of iPhone owners. As for Android, that number was at 27% - less than a third. In 2011, a<a href="http://blog.hunch.com/?p=51781"> survey</a> of 15,818 Hunch users found that iOS users are more likely to be female, while Android users still trend male. But why?

It's about the advertising, although this focusses on the US. Is there a gender bias in phone adverts here?

You'll probably want Chrome or Firefox because it uses the <audio> and <video> tags. Brilliant.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will be making an application to the Federal Court in Melbourne tomorrow at 9:30am for orders against Apple Pty Limited and Apple Inc (Apple) for alleged contraventions of the Australian Consumer Law (ACL).

The ACCC alleges that Apple's recent promotion of the new "iPad with WiFi + 4G" is misleading because it represents to Australian consumers that the product "iPad with WiFi + 4G" can, with a SIM card, connect to a 4G mobile data network in Australia, when this is not the case.

Can't see Apple winning this one. (Thanks @rquick for the link.)

You’re attending a baseball game and call Google’s 411 service for information about a nearby restaurant. The cheers of the crowd and the sounds of the announcer are picked up by your phone. Google’s system analyzes the background noise, takes into account your location, determines that you’re at a ballgame and delivers related ads or links to your phone with sports scores and news.

Or maybe you’re making the call from a concert hall, and the sound in the background is the instruments tuning up during intermission. Google figures out that you’re at a concert, and serves up musical news or ads about albums related to the performance.

We recall companies suggesting they would make money from ads piped into phone calls before. Never went anywhere. Will this be different? (Google also acknowledges that users would be able to disable the sensors used to gather the information, for privacy.)

From May 2011:

Practitioners should realize the following about text advertisements:

Users demonstrate text advertisement “blindness” when viewing web pages. This means that information displayed in areas of the page dedicated to text ads (e.g., top of the page, right side) is generally ignored or viewed last.
Users are less likely to find information on a web page if it is located on the right side of the page than on the top of the page if both areas resemble text ads. This is especially true when they are searching for specific information.

When conducting an informational, or semantic, search, users have equal amount of difficulty finding information that is embedded in an ad either at the top or on the right side of the page.

There's more, equally interesting.

James Whittaker, who left Microsoft for Google, and then Google for Microsoft:

It wasn’t an easy decision to leave Google. During my time there I became fairly passionate about the company. I keynoted four Google Developer Day events, two Google Test Automation Conferences and was a prolific contributor to the Google testing blog. Recruiters often asked me to help sell high priority candidates on the company. No one had to ask me twice to promote Google and no one was more surprised than me when I could no longer do so. In fact, my last three months working for Google was a whirlwind of desperation, trying in vain to get my passion back.

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

This post has been going viral. Note that it's on the MSDN blog, not Whittaker's own - a clever bit of PR by Microsoft.

Ed Bott:

For years, Google was famous for its clean, uncluttered layout and its excellent search algorithms. Those days are long gone.

Google <a
href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-apple-and-google-where-does-the-money-come-from/4469">gets 96% of its annual revenue</a> from advertising. Search results produce no revenue. That has led to some tremendous distortions and a horrifying breakdown in the once-clean Google experience.</p><p>I present Exhibit A, which I discovered thanks to <a
href="http://twitter.com/#!/trevin/status/176451086985601026">Twitter</a>.

If you’re signed in to your Google+ account and you search for <strong>pet meds</strong>, a little ad module appears at the top of the search results, with your email address already filled in.

Less obvious outside the US, but just wait for the EC antitrust decision.

Advertising Standards Authority rejects complaint from disappointed iPhone 4S owner. But it's the ASA's logic that's interesting:

The belief that Siri would be able to direct users to useful local businesses was not implicit from the advert, said the ASA, and was an expectation that would not trouble the UK's "average customer", who, the agency asserted would have little knowledge of technology journalism or Apple product launches.

Translated: you might know that Apple has or is going to do things, but most people don't. This doesn't quite explain the giant dip in Apple's iPhone sales in the third quarter of 2011, though, which Apple put down to people being led to expect a new device that didn't materialise during that period.

Isn’t it curious that Google+ doesn’t actually show you any ads? It’s because the time-on-site and page views there are trivial. Hit the road, Jack. Don’t you ever come back and post an update, upload a photo, or add anyone to your Circles. It doesn’t matter. What’s important to Google is getting your biographical data.

Logicaly consistent.

HTML5 demo showing how you get tracked by cookies across various sites. Available as a downloadable add-on for Firefox. More than a little creepy:

If you haven't realized it yet, companies are tracking you across most of the sites you visit daily on the web. It's quite likely that these companies know more about you than your government. Some of them might even know more about you than your best friends.

Lauren Weinstein:

Part of the problem is that the entire concept of simplistic internet “Do Not Track” systems is based on a number of false premises. Maybe the biggest misleading assertion is that internet advertising is essentially equivalent to the invasive telephone solicitations the “Do Not Call” registry was created to quash.

But most internet ads — occasional egregious exceptions notwithstanding — aren’t anything like some phone-calling stooge interrupting your dinner. And reducing the value of web ads to advertisers — either through ad blocking systems or “Do Not Track” regimes that encourage random rather than personalized ads — fundamentally undermines the primary funding mechanisms that help to satisfy our (let’s admit it!) essentially selfish desires to keep most web services free.

It was on reading this that you suddenly understand that the thing about web ads is that hardly anyone acts on them at all. They may be some of the most-ignored content ever anywhere, and have been for years.

With our most recent app updates, Promoted Accounts are now in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android. And in the coming weeks, we’ll begin introducing Promoted Tweets in the timeline on these mobile apps. Initially, a small number of users may see Promoted Tweets near the top of their timelines from brands they already follow. This will help ensure that people see important Tweets from the brands they care about.

For both products, the experience will be the same as on Twitter.com:
Promoted Tweets will appear in your timeline like any other Tweet, and like regular Tweets, they will appear in your timeline just once; as you scroll, the Promoted Tweet will flow with the rest of the Tweets in your timeline.
As with Promoted Tweets in search, we will only display Promoted Tweets in the timeline when they are relevant. If you see a Promoted Tweet that isn’t relevant to you, you can easily dismiss it from your timeline with a single swipe.
Promoted Accounts appear in your list of Who to Follow recommendations.

Not in third-party apps? Then again, Twitter must know what it does and doesn't control.

Matthews recounts his experience of trying to buy ads for his book on Google and on Facebook. He preferred the latter. And:

if you really want your head to spin, think about this: according to a friend in retailing, the average Facebook woman updates her relationship status to “Engaged” within two hours of the guy actually proposing…so Facebook sells that relationship status information to retailers who have bridal registries.

(Via Galavantmedia.com)

Japanese carrier KDDI has underscored some of the problems of Android by pushing ads into Android itself, customers have found for themselves. A bundled, unremovable app for the company's own app store, au one Market, pushes ads into the notification bar whether or not the app is running, Asiajin said. While there appears to be an opt-out clause, one subscriber reports that it's downplayed and has seen it appear twice with app updates.

Technically removable, if you root the phone.

"The ads will be marked “Sponsored” and a rate limit will ensure users see no more than 1 Sponsored Story in the news feed per day. They’ll only feature stories about friends or Pages that users already like. Users won’t be able to opt out of seeing Sponsored Stories in the news feed or having their activity used in them, but they will be able to ‘x’ out individual ads. The ads won’t immediately appear in the mobile news feed, though Facebook is considering the idea as we discussed earlier this month."

"If you are a content producer or a freemium app or game developer, you would know, instantly, what I am talking about: there is WAY too much ad inventory out there. Too many eyeballs that are not getting adequately monetised. Major publishers sitting on top of huge masses of unmonetised impressions. Game developers monetising, barely, 1-2% of their traffic. App developers, similarly, struggling to convert free users to premium.

"If you are an entrepreneur, looking for an open problem to solve, look no further. This is your opportunity. In 2012, one of the greatest unaddressed pain points for the mobile and online industries is this overabundance of eyeballs that publishers, software, app and game developers are struggling to find monetisation models for."

Tim Anderson goes hunting for the booklet advertised as being available from the Citizens Advice Bureau about being safe online. The physical booklet, not the web site.

"Dell has apologised for misleading customers after PC Pro highlighted a Help page on the company's website that exaggerated the benefits of a high-end graphics card.

"The Dell website showed two identical monitors, the one on the left allegedly using a 'standard graphics card' and the other a 'high-end graphics card'.

"The monitor with the lesser graphics chip showed a blurry, washed-out image of the Windows desktop, with the more expensive card delivering a sharper, more vivid picture."

So how should Dell have illustrated the better-quality graphics card option?

An infographic prepared for Nokia World showing that though you might not realise it, lots of people click on ads on Nokia apps. Counter-intuitive. Our question (which isn't answered in the graphic) is what the actual numbers are, and how that translates into per-handset figures. Then we'd really start to know about Nokia's value.

Buddy Media, the Facebook advertising affiliate, now worth about $500m, according to its latest funding round.

"The innocent-seeming “1 Tip” ad is actually the tip of something much larger: a vast array of diet and weight-loss companies hawking everything from pills made from African mangoes to potions made from exotic acai berries. Federal officials have alleged that the companies behind the ads make inflated claims about their products and use deceptive means to market them.<br />
"The take so far: at least $1 billion and counting.<br />
"The “1 Tip” ads are the work of armies of “affiliates,” independent promoters who place them on behalf of small diet-product sellers with names such as HCG Ultra Lean Plus. The promoters profit each time someone clicks through to the product seller’s site and orders a free sample. The sample, however, isn’t always so free."

From 2007: "Summary: Users rarely look at display advertisements on websites. Of the four design elements that do attract a few ad fixations, one is unethical and reduces the value of advertising networks."<br />
<br />
The one that's unethical? Used all the time by scareware scammers. Interesting too for its pointers to what people actually look at on web pages.

"Google is now the largest online display advertiser in the US in terms of revenues, knocking Yahoo! off its perch, according to figures from IDC. The report shows Google overtaking Yahoo! with 14.7% of the market in Q1 2011, up from 13.3% in the same period last year. Overall, the display advertising market boomed in the first quarter, with ad revenues hitting $7.3bn - the highest Q1 revenue for the industry ever, according to figures from the IAB and PwC.<br />
"Yahoo!'s market share is dropping almost as quickly as Google's is rising, dropping to 12.3%, down from 13.3% last year. This makes Google market leader in both display advertising and search, where it is the long-established number one. This shift comes as search ad revenues are squeezed by display, which now has a higher market worth."<br />
<br />
Tricky for Yahoo, which makes its money serving ads.

Nottingham City Council got £15,000 from Google AdSense on its site. Good thing? Short looked at the ads and thought they weren't always appropriate: 'payday loans', business rates avoidance, pole dancing lessons. "The conclusion I drew was that Nottingham City Council either didn’t monitor which ads were served on their website or didn’t particularly care. Either way I found it hard to see how the council and the community got a net financial benefit from this advertising, quite aside from issues of appropriateness, likely offence and web clarity/usability."