Beaver jokes can win traffic

AOL:

• AOL has snapped up Buy.at, an affiliate marketing network that started in the UK but is expanding quickly into the US.
• An AOL investor call says operating income will be down in 2008 due to flat pageviews and plateaued revenue from paid search, among other factors.

Campaigns of Note:

• GoDaddy, master of the non-controversial controversy, says traffic to its site hit record highs after the Super Bowl, when people came to see "too hot for TV" versions of its ads.
• American Express is sponsoring FashionWeek360, the YouTube channel that hosts off video from the upcoming Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.

Microsoft/Yahoo:

• Some worry that partners in Yahoo's newspaper consortium may get the fuzzy end of the lollipop if Microsoft's bid is accepted.
• Flickr users are unhappy with the possible Microsoft-ization of their favorite photo-sharing site. They are showcasing their displeasure with a Flickr photo pool.
• Yahoo shareholders are driving the stock price down in an effort to scuttle the deal.
• Whether or not the deal passes, online ad spend is expected to grow more or less as previously forecast.
• The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee promises to hold panel hearings on the deal.
• Bloomberg thinks Microhoo might shut Google out of display advertising.
• Barry Diller says the time it would take for the two companies to merge is time Ask.com will use to innovate.

Online Ad Market:

• Dapper is planning an ad-targeting product that uses semantic data of user behavior to assign a certain value to each part of a site.
• The Association for Downloadable Media is introducing standards and guidelines for advertising best practices in April.
• AdCamo is launching a network for background advertising that can be used on a variety of sites.
• Mochila launched an open standards RSS Atom API. Publishers can use it to port Mochila content onto their webpages.

Overseas:

• MSN Video users in Europe can watch programs and music videos from MTV International and Sony BMG, the result of a deal between the parties.
• Google is taking the fight to Baidu with free, legal music downloads for users in China.
• Advertising Week has inaugurated a sister city to its New York headquarters: Moscow, Russia, which shall host an annual event called the "Advertising Jubilee."
• China is permitting online video-sharing sites to keep operating.

Signs of What's to Come:

• TV broadcasters are endorsing a study by the NAB that shows $2 billion could be brought if they agree on standards for mobile executions.
• Viewers are increasingly hitting the Web to stream their "favorite" shows on a regular basis, according to research by the Solutions Research Group.

Social Networks:

• Bebo is partnering with Music Nation to expose new bands.
• Facebook will reward applications that get the most positive feedback by allowing them to send more notifications to users.
• Widget vendor Slide is releasing a host of new applications built on MySpace's new Developer Platform.