ComScore released stats May 13 showing the social network led all online publishers in the U.S. with 176 billion display ad impressions for the first quarter of 2010, good for a 16.2 percent market share. Yahoo came in second with 132 billion impressions, or 12.1 percent of the market. Microsoft is No. 3 with 60 billion impressions, or a 5.5 percent share. All of this means social advertising is on the rise, commensurate with the activity of the 400 million-plus users on leading social network Facebook.

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This is an interesting little slide show about banner ads and interactivity. It has some good pointers for why digital ads are more successful for getting people to interact with the ad, which then turns into a better association with the brand (people remember brands more that they have interacted with). It also has some examples of the best banner ads.

To see the slide show, click here.

An interesting article about the popular Pandora radio. Since the initial creation of Pandora internet radio about 9 years ago the popularity of the user based radio station creator has seen massive growth in the number of users that use the service. About two years ago Pandora radio introduced a mobile version of there internet radio. In the past two years with the ever gowing popularity of smart phones and the inevitable future growth of smart phone pandora mobile has collected about 6million users for the mobile app. This growing popularity has intrigue many large companies to purchase add time or in a sense commercials that would be played to the user after so many songs. Another reason many companies are interested in working with Pandora is that its users play around with the service a lot, creating radio stations, rating songs which companies like target and best buy could look at to see what is popular with the general public and market to them accordingly. Another example of how these companies are advertising to users is Domino's, for example, puts up ads that urge people to call in for a pizza directly from their phones. Other companies are using coupons. Docker's offered a 20% discount if visitors went to the brand's site and entered the promotional code "Pandora."

Not only does this method create a high customer response to the adds retail companies can gain very valuable information from user inputs that they may use to market there product more effectively to them.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_22/b4133052597112.htm

Apparently Google, the leading provider of online advertising broker, has no problems over the increasing popularity of ad-blocking extensions on its own web browser, Chrome. During a browser-centered conference in Mountain View, Califorinia Google Engineering Director Linus Upson discussed how online ads - while blocked by many users - are ultimately useful to people when searching for relevant subjects. "It's unlikely that ad blockers will get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising needs to get less annoying." Upson said that there is an equilibrium between the online ad market and consumers, thus if blockers become an issue, advertisers will rethink their strategies and aggressiveness.

uSocial has offered the people that run Twitter $500,000 to run a single banner ad on Twitter for only 24 hours. They believe that even though it looks like a huge sum of money for so little time to be exposed to the world, that their investment will be rewarded. Evan Williams, the founder of Twitter still believes that the focus of Twitter should still be the improvement of the program rather than turning to revenue yet.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/6408536/Twitter-offered-500000-to-run-advert.html