E-Commerce Growth Rocketing Upward

Ripped out of the doldrums online retail has been experiencing in the middle of 2004, e-commerce spending for the week ending September 26 vaulted up 53 percent over the same period last year - a radical departure from generally torpid... continue reading »

Study: Cable Networks Stingy with 'A' Slots

A Media IQ study reports cable networks generally fail to provide fair rotations of commercials into the favorable "A" slots, as their contracts require. Networks like E!, Comedy Central and VH1 tend to run their own promotional spots in the... continue reading »

AOL Sinking Out of Top 3 Ad Sites

AOL, once the advertising giant on the internet, has fallen out of the top three in terms of ad sales. Accounting scandals, dot-com bubble bursting and subscription-oriented business models aside, much of the problem stemmed from a highly dysfunctional sales... continue reading »

Google Chooses DomainKeys

Google's Gmail started putting DomainKeys signatures into its outgoing emails, joining up with Yahoo's proprietary system of sender verification. The DomainKeys system competes with Microsoft's Sender ID as a mechanism by which ISPs can tell whether or not email comes... continue reading »

Amazon's Silly 'One-Click' Patent Survives Sillier Patent Challenge

Amazon successfully defended its silly "one-click" patent against an even sillier claim by IPXL Holdings LLC that a patent IPXL holds pre-empts the one-click "technology." Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled summarily in Amazon's favor, agreeing with the e-commerce giant's contention that... continue reading »

Google Desktop Search Once 'Total Recall'

Ripping apart the Google Desktop Search application, coders are discovering artifacts that may - or may not - suggest the future direction of Google's development efforts. One security consultant, finding a "google_im://" protocol in the code jumped to the conclusion... continue reading »

Microsoft Testing Own Social Network

Microsoft has been testing out its own social network experiment, positioned as a means to share digital media among "small friendship groups," as well as blog. The product is not open to uninvited members, and its copyright notice extends back... continue reading »

Wireless Spam Ban Starts Today

Today the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) new rules against wireless spam go into effect, showing the most strict limitations involved in last year's Can-Spam legislation. The law bans unsolicited commercial wireless messages, a level of restriction that many anti-spam advocates... continue reading »

FBI: Direct Marketers Can Help Fight Identity Theft

An FBI official spoke at a Direct Marketing Association (DMA) show, praising the DMA's Slam Spam effort, and indicating that the direct marketing industry could also help with efforts against identity theft. The Slam Spam effort started out as a... continue reading »

Telemarketing Beats Email in Response Rates

A Direct Marketing Association (DMA) study showed that telemarketing led a list of a dozen different direct response media in terms of response rates. With a 5.78 response rate, the medium well out paced the next closest rivals, which tended... continue reading »

Click Inflation Hitting Longer Search Phrases

Commenting on a chart appearing on BatelleMedia, SearchEngineLowdown notes that advertisers are starting to place higher bids on longer search phrases. The search blog notes that advertisers are either discovering that longer phrases convert better or they're just seeking the... continue reading »

Study: We're All Email Slaves

DoubleClick published a massive tracking study on email habits, showing that more and more people are becoming slaves to their email (33 percent versus 20 percent from the previous year). The average email user now gets 308 emails a week,... continue reading »