Bloggers and web publishers looking for a quick way to make some cash have long turned to advertisers willing to pay for text links on their web sites. Some text links hang out in a section of a web site clearly labeled as sponsored links. But others have a way of making their way into the body of a post, where they look like any other link on a web page. But typically when you scroll over a text ad placed by an advertising service like Vibrant Media, you'll see a pop up which makes it clear that you're looking at an ad and not necessarily a relevant link placed by the author of the article you're reading.

Now there's a new ad service called InLinks which automates the process of placing in-text links that don't look like ads on a web site. While this may come as good news for a handful of advertisers and web publishers who want to resort to this tactic, if the practice catches on, it could erode people's willingness to click any links at all. After all, if you can't tell the difference between a relevant text link and an ad, there's a good chance you'll err on the side of ignoring all the links.

On the other hand, the inLinks example image shown above leads me to believe that it won't be that tough to spot the fake links on a web site. After all, what blogger would really bother placing a legitimate link under the words "gadget" or "widget?"

What do you think? Is InLinks providing a useful service that will help bloggers make money, or is the company ruining the internet for the rest of us?

[via ProBlogger]

You know all those ads you see all over the internet telling you that your old friends from high school, or the lonely half-naked girl down the street are waiting for you to call? Yeah, it turns out they're not always telling the truth. But one San Diego man figured that when he signed up for a free Classmates.com account and was then told that his friends were trying to contact him and he could find out who they were by paying $15 to upgrade his account, it couldn't hurt to shell out a few bucks.

But once he did, Anthony Michaels discovered that nobody he knew or had gone to school with was actually trying to contact him. And the only users who had viewed his profile were people he had never heard of.

Most people would probably just figure they were out $15, because it would take more time and effort to try to recover the money than it was worth. But Michaels decided to try to put together a class action suit. Presumably, he's hoping to get more than $15 per user out of this, but the bigger point is that he's trying to get a court to show that Classmates.com used deceptive practices to convince him to become a paying member.

Remember how Yahoo! and Google announced this summer that they would be partnering to place Google AdSense ads next to Yahoo! search results? Yeah, that's not going to happen.

Basically, Google says it's pulling out of the deal because government regulators and "some advertisers" are uncomfortable with the idea. The New York Times puts things a bit more strongly, mentioning that regulators planned to file a lawsuit to block the patnership between two of the largest web search portals.

The deal was first announced back in June, shortly after Microsoft walked away from negotiations to purchase the company. At this point, it's not clear what the future holds for Yahoo!, a company that's clearly looking for ways to revitalize its brand.

OpenX is an open source ad server that you can install on a web server to provide a complete ad management package for your web sites. The software lets you create entries for advertisers, ad zones, and campaigns. You can also apply a whole slew of filters that will do things like show one ad to a visitor in the US and another ad in the same spot to a visitor from Germany.

The down side? Up until recently you could only use OpenX by setting it up on your web host. In other words, even if you have a web site hosted on a free service like Google's Bloggger, you still need to sign up for a web hosting account, which usually costs money, to use OpenX.

Earlier this year OpenX announced it would launch hosted version of its ad server. The service is still in private beta, but I got a chance to check it out over the weekend, and it's pretty slick. The hosted version of OpenX provides all the same features you'd get from the self-hosted version. But there's no setup required. You just request an invitation and wait (im)patiently for one to arrive in your inbox. Once you're in, you can start creating campaigns in a matter of seconds.

OpenX also recently launched the OpenX Market Alpha, which allows publishers to sell their ad space directly to advertisers. The Market is still pretty new, so there aren't a lot of advertisers just yet. You probably won't get rich by signing up during the Alpha. But it probably won't hurt either. Publishers can set a minimum rate so that your default ads, say Google AdSense, or Amazon Affiliate units will show up unless an advertiser meets that price. But if a member of the OpenX Market has a higher bid than your minimum, their ad will be shown instead.

Google recently rolled out its own hosted ad management service. But while Google Ad Manager is certainly much simpler to use, it doesn't offer nearly as many customization options as OpenX.

There's a saying that "advertising abhors a vacuum." In other words, if there's a blank space on a wall, telephone poll, or the back of your eyelids, eventually someone will figure out how to put an advertisement there. With that in mind, Google has rolled out two new features this week intended to help fill the vacuum.

First up, the company continues to try to justify its massive investment in online video. Making money from YouTube videos has proven surprisingly tricky. May viewers are resistant to pre-roll and post-roll video ads. And in-video pop up ads can be even more annoying if not handled properly. One possible solution? Affiliate links.

YouTube is rolling out "click-to-buy" links on some videos allowing you to purchase music featured in a video from Amazon or iTunes. Even if you're not planning to buy the song, the links can help you identify the music playing in the background of some popular videos.

Google is also rolling out a beta of Adsense for Games. Basically, these are ads designed to be integrated with web-based video games. Ads could include video, image, or text ads that will appear within the game.

No word on the AdSense for eyelids thing yet.

Whether you liked the Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld show about nothing or not, it certainly generated a lot of buzz about the company. Not about Windows Vista, Office 2007, or any particular product. But certainly about Microsoft. So perhaps Microsoft really is following through with a carefully crafted plan to build buzz and then roll out a new phase of the ad campaign. But I'm certainly not the only one to note that it looks like Microsoft is firing Seinfeld for a job poorly done.

Jerry Seinfeld, famous for developing a popular TV show "about nothing," seems to be at it again. Except this time he's part of a $300 million advertising campaign for Microsoft that also seems to be about nothing. And while nothing might be kind of funny in 22 minute segments that are always about something at their core, the first Microsoft commercial starring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld really does seem to be about nothing. In that pointless, mind-boggling, "what the hell are they trying to say?" kind of way.

It would probably be bearable if the 90 second commercial were at least funny. But really, it's not. The point is apparently to introduce the audience to the characters and the funny will come in later ads. Presumably so will information about Vista. But seriously. 90 seconds of nothing? The very first Mac vs. PC ad weighed in at around 30 seconds, was funny, and didn't require much setup. If this is the best Microsoft's ad team has to offer, Apple doesn't have much to worry about.

On the other hand, while Apple continues to gain popularity, Microsoft still dwarfs the company in terms of market share. So maybe Microsoft doesn't really need to follow the format set by others.

ScribeFire is a Firefox add-on that lets you write blog posts while surfing the web. It provides a WYSIWYG editor that works with most popular blogging software. And it's free. We've always wondered how ScribeFire plans to make money, and now we know. The team recently launched a private beta of ScribeFire QuickAds, a service that makes it easy for anyone to monetize their blogs.

All you have to to place ads on your blog is click an ad size and then choose a location on your blog where you'd like the ad to appear. When you first register your blog with QuickAds, ScribeFire will automatically add a bit of code to your blog template allowing the program to place ads in your page.

Right now ScribeFire will pass all the earnings on to web publishers, but we expect we'll eventually see ScribeFire take a cut of the action. Ads will come from a variety of networks, and ScribeFire will attempt to determine which ads will generate the highest payouts. You can also keep track of your ad impressions, earnings, and other statistics online by viewing your ScribeFire Dashboard.

As we mentioned, ScribeFire QuickAds is currently in private beta. But the first 100 people to send an email to l downloadsquad@scribefire.com will get a registration code. Everyone else can request an invitation online.

You can find out more by checking out the video after the jump.

Now that Yahoo! has finally decided things are really over with Microsoft, the company has found room in its heart for a new love: Google. The two companies today announced an advertising partnership that will basically place Google AdSense advertisements alongside Yahoo! search results.

The deal isn't exactly comprehensive. It covers "some of" Yahoo!'s web properties, and the ads will only be displayed in the US and Canada. The agreement is non-exclusive, which means that Yahoo! may display its own ads or ads from other parties as well.

In a press release, Yahoo! says it expects to raise about $800 million in revenue per year from the deal. Google, in return, posted a blog entry saying the deal is "good for users, advertisers, and publishers." The US government isn't quite convinced yet. Back in April, the Justice Department responded to a test run of a Google/Yahoo! partnership with an investigation. And today the chairman of the US Senate Antitrust Subcommittee said the Senate will be closely examining the deal.

It's been almost a year since Google acquired RSS service Feedburner or $100 million. But in that year, we've seen very little integration of Google services into Feedburner, or vice versa. Sure, it's now easier to redirect your Blogspot feed to Feedburner, but that's about it.

Now, according to the official Feedburner blog, the company is getting ready to roll out the thing we'd all kind of been expecting: Google AdSense integration. What that means is you're probably going to start seeing much more advertising in your RSS reader.

While there are already a few ways to place ads in an RSS feed, a huge number of blogs and web sites use Feedburner to polish and publish their feeds. Being able to place ads in their feeds with just a few clicks of a button almost certainly means that many of those content publishers will be flipping the switch as soon as they can. Up until now, most web publishers viewed RSS feeds as a loss leader. You give away some of your content, ad-free, in the hopes of gaining loyal readers who will tell their friends about the site. But if you can also get a few of them to click on ads even if they rarely visit your actual web page, why wouldn't you do it?

What do you think? Are you a web publisher looking forward to Google AdSense/Feedburner integration? Or are you a loyal blog reader preparing to unsubscribe to any feeds that start displaying ads?

There are two interesting Twitter stories making the rounds this morning. First up is the launch of a localized version of Twitter for Japan. The fact that the microblogging service is branching out to other countries isn't particularly surprising. But what is significant is the fact that the Japanese version of Twitter features advertisements, something which the English language version of the site lacks.

It's likely that Twitter will roll out English ads at some point. The site has no other source of revenue. But whenever you roll out an ad-free service and then start placing display ads on the interface, people will complain. So it's probably a smart move to include advertisements from the get go in Japan.

In other news, an apparent Twitter privacy breach turned out to be a bit of a false alarm. But only a bit. Blogger and Twitter user Orli Yakuel discovered that many of her Twitter direct messages, which were supposed to be private communications between two users, were showing up on her public timeline. This is basically the same thing as posting your private emails on your blog. Not good.

It turns out that Twitter probably wasn't responsible. Rather, Orli was testing a new service called GroupTweet, and entered her account info instead of setting up a new account. But this raises another issue. There are a huge number of third party tools for Twitter. And many require you to enter your login information. While we've been pretty happy to do this in the past, figuring the worst that could happen would be that someone would start sending out Tweets in our name and we'd delete our account, the possibility of our private messages being made public hadn't really occurred to us. There really needs to be a better way for third party applications to access your Twitter data without requiring your username and password.

As predicted almost a year ago, Microsoft has begun offering a free, advertising supported version of Microsoft Works, its office application suite for people too cheap to spring for Office. But it doesn't appear that there's any way to download and install Microsoft Works SE (Sponsored Edition) yourself just yet. Rather, computer makers are starting to install the software on new PCs.

Basically the program works just as well (read that statement however you'd like) as the full version of MS Works, but users will see a small advertisement in the program window, whether they're editing a spreadsheet or text document.

The new version of Works is available to computer makers for free. Of course, OpenOffice.org is also available for free, but you don't see PC makers including that on computers that ship with Windows yet. Works SE isn't available everywhere yet. It's apparently showing up on selected computers in the US, Canada, and a handful of European countries.

Six Apart, the company behind the Moveable Type and TypePad blogging platforms is moving into the services and advertising businesses.

Last week the company purchased Apperceptive, a company with experience developing attractive blogs and web sites. Now anyone can sign up for assistance with their own blog at the Six Apart services page. The company is offering a variety of packages covering such things as pre-launch blog design, and tune-ups for existing sites. Each package will set you back $200, and you'll need to be using TypePad to take advantage of the services, but there's also a $200 migration package if you want to switch platforms.

Six Apart is also launching an advertising network that will group similar web sites in order to attract big name advertisers. Other blog advertising networks like Federated Media do the same thing, but Federated Media typically only accepts big name blogs. It'll be interesting to see if Six Apart can open up the process to smaller web sites.

[via TechCrunch]

You know the federal Do Not Call registry that lets US telephone customers sign up for a list to avoid telemarketers? Two consumer advocacy groups are asking the Federal Trade Commission to basically create the same kind of registry -- for the internet.

Now, let's pretend that a US agency could regulate the way that internet companies track your data for advertising and other purposes. How exactly would that work? One way would be for the the FTC would have to require every advertising firm and web site that's accessible in the US to use a potentially enormous list of consumers to figure which computers they can place cookies on and which computers they cannot.

Or the burden could be placed on consumers to sign up for a service like the Network Advertising Initiative, which places its own cookie on your computer to alert over a dozen major advertisers that you have chosen to opt-out of targeted ads. But if you happen to clean out your cookies accidentally, you'll need to reinstall the software. or if you happen across a page from a company that hasn't signed on, you could still be tracked.

We're not saying that consumers shouldn't be able to opt out of targeted advertising. We're just saying that the people asking for federal regulation seem to be either incredibly ambitious or they lack a basic understanding of how the internet works.

[via Techdirt and CNet]

Yahoo! could be preparing to launch a Google Analytics competitor. The big Y has acquired Tensa Kft, makers of IndexTools.

Yahoo! will integrate IndexTools with its current analytic tools to help build the company's advertising network. The services will first be available to members of the Yahoo! ad network, but eventually the company plans to build a system that will let third party developers "monitor and optimize the traffic performance" of web applications.

The deal is expected to close in the first half of the year. The terms of the acquisition were not released.

[via TechCrunch]