Freaking out about the easier opt-outs proposed by some online-privacy advocates? Maybe you don’t have so much to worry about.

In June, Fetchback, an advertising network that specializes in ad “retargeting,” added a link within its ad units that, when clicked, took consumers to a page that explained who the advertiser was and how the ad got there and gave contact info for Fetchback, as well as a way to opt out of future targeting.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Twitter’s been the toast of TV news programs, daytime talk shows, magazine editors and newspaper reporters. But what’s all that chatter worth?

According to news-monitoring service VMS, a cool $48 million over the past 30 days.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen countless stories about the “Oprah effect” on Twitter–TechCrunch suggested more than one million people signed up and many a blog linked to Hitwise data that suggested the talk-show doyenne’s endorsement of the service led to a 43 percent spike in Twitter traffic.

While those numbers are important, the breathless reports have not accounted for what people do after they sign up for a Twitter account.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

A month ago Dennis Woodside was running Google’s (GOOG) U.K., Ireland and Benelux business out of London, thinking that’s where he and his family would be for at least a few more years. But that was before Tim Armstrong, Google’s president-Americas Operations, decamped for AOL (TWX) and Mr. Woodside was tapped as his replacement, to run Google’s business in the Americas region. Since then, he’s spent a week in New York, then California and then back in New York. Next week you’ll find him in London. And after that he’ll start the cycle all over again–a schedule he’ll pretty much live by until his family moves to the U.S. in July.

Read the rest of this post at the original site

There are two places most of today’s laid-off executives are heading: to job-search sites to see what other opportunities are out there and to networking sites in hopes they can reconnect with–and milk leads from–former colleagues and business contacts. One site, LinkedIn, offers both of those things in one place.

So it should come as no surprise that the site’s traffic is up in the recession. It hit 36 million members last Monday and is adding them at a rate of about one member per second. According to ComScore, it’s gone from about 3.6 million unique monthly visitors a year ago to 7.7 million today, which would make it even with Yahoo HotJobs, the third-largest online job site.

Read the rest of this post

Google is borrowing from its most successful money-minting product, search ads, to goose revenue on its video-sharing site YouTube. The move comes just as YouTube’s search traffic has passed the No. 2 search engine behind Google, Yahoo.com.

Read the rest of this post

Every minute, 10 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. While that figure is a source of pride for the Google-owned video-sharing site, for marketers and amateur video creators attempting to get their video found, it’s downright daunting. That’s why a cottage industry has cropped up around optimizing and analyzing online video and, increasingly, that industry includes YouTube itself.

Read the rest of this post