Stirring up cash with pay-per-click ad models is standard fare on the Internet, but what about paying per pixel?

In a mashup of art project-meets-electronic bulletin board-meets-Internet parody, Rhizome, the new-media affiliate of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, has launched a fund-raising site that sells space by the pixel–five cents per pixel, to be exact.

It’s called the 50,000 Dollar Web page and aims to raise just that amount in the next two months by charging users for representation on a large square grid, which, as a finished product, will likely be an eye-catching smattering of ads, links and images.

Rhizome modeled the page off the work of the British student Alex Tew, who sold pixels for tuition on his Million Dollar Homepage in 2005.

“I really welcomed the idea of doing something nontraditional,” says Lauren Cornell, Rhizome’s executive director and an adjunct curator at the New Museum, which is based in New York.

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When NBC Universal and News Corp. created Hulu, they gave the video portal a valuable but short-term asset: exclusive rights to distribute NBC and Fox shows outside of the media giants’ own websites.

From that base of content, Hulu.com has become the fourth-biggest online video distributor by unique visitors in January, behind YouTube, Yahoo and MySpace, according to the latest from Nielsen VideoCensus. In total video streams, it’s No. 3, with 232 million, behind YouTube (5.8 billion) and Yahoo (277 million).

But the exclusive part of that NBC-News Corp. deal lasts only two years, and Hulu knows all too well that the scarcity that helped it establish an audience (and brand) is going away soon. Hulu has never said exactly when the deal expires, but it’s likely within a year after the first anniversary of Hulu’s public launch, in March.

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Mobile marketing network 4INFO plans to announce Thursday that it has received $20 million in venture funding led by Peacock Equity, a joint venture between NBC Universal and GE Commercial Finance’s media, communications and entertainment business.

4INFO works with media companies, including Yahoo (YHOO), IAC/InterActiveCorp. (IACZ) and Gannett (GCI) to provide weather updates, sports scores and other information via text messages that contain small ads. The Silicon Valley start-up sends more text messages in the U.S., by volume, than any other provider, according to Nielsen. 4INFO says it delivers more than 80 million user-requested text messages per month and that its network includes 16 million users.

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Last night, Yahoo (YHOO) emailed their search advertisers about new terms and conditions, including a controversial provision that they are allowed to create ads, remove or add keywords to campaigns and “optimize” accounts–which could allow for bid changes. All of this can be done without seeking the advertiser’s permission beforehand. Though the provision is at least six months old, it finally got noticed due to the recent email–and is attracting some outcry.

Here is the snippet in the terms and conditions that states this:

Sponsored Search 3. OPTIMIZATION. In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s). Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s). We will notify you via email of such changes made to your account(s), and can also include a spreadsheet of such changes upon your written request.”

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Everyone knows it, so it must be true: Everyone hates pre-roll video ads–the mini-ads that publishers want you to sit through before you actually watch a clip. We bail out on them constantly, and everyone we know does the same. But video ad network Tremor Media says we and everyone we know are in a small minority.

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In my article in Monday’s Times, “To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on What You Click,” I worked with comScore to develop a new measure for Web companies: how much data they can collect from users.

On the Internet, companies are typically ranked by how many different people visit their sites in a given month. And when Microsoft announced its $41 billion bid for Yahoo, comScore and Nielsen Online promptly put out estimates counting how many people would be in the merged company’s total audience.

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A few months ago, I shopped around for a Web site to help keep track of my spending habits. I was looking for a service that would charge me nothing yet work flawlessly, protect my privacy and make me feel good about myself–a tall order, I’ll admit. I settled on a little start-up called Wesabe, mostly because the founders seemed so committed to, well … to being cool dudes. The company has a detailed and very encouraging policy on privacy and data ownership and has recruited privacy-obsessed Alpha Geeks like Cory Doctorow and Clay Shirky to serve on its advisory board. In its frequently asked questions, Wesabe comes across as positively saintly: They won’t sell ads because ads encourage you to spend, they plan on making money by helping people reach their financial goals, and their security measures are at least as impressive as those used by your credit card company. If Wesabe were a person, I’d be seriously smitten.

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Yahoo is buying Maven Networks, a company that helps outfits like CBS and Sony put their video online. Its press release is full of all sorts of ways this will help Yahoo: It gets video technology. Yahoo will be able to use its sales force to sell video ads on partner sites. And it will be able to syndicate its content to other sites and bring other video content onto Yahoo.

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VideoEgg has announced that its ad network for Facebook applications–eggnetwork–has pulled in around $1.5 million in ad revenue over the past five months. While the company is touting the news as a “million-dollar payday” for developers, it actually seems like a fairly paltry figure when you consider the companies on eggnetwork’s client list.

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All of the entertainment options that are hot on the PC–social networking, Web video, user-generated content–are downright torrid on the smallest of screens, the cellphone. New research from Deloitte & Touche finds that 47% of 25- to 41-year-olds use their cellphones for entertainment, a massive surge from the 29% who said they did so only eight short months ago. And where the eyeballs go, there go both the ad dollars and the aspirations of many businessmen.

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Coca-Cola’s decision to pause and rethink their involvement with Facebook’s Beacon advertising program was a big topic of discussion over the weekend in this corner of the Internet we call the blogosphere. It was a particularly shocking reversal, given that Coke was one of the landmark partners of Facebook’s new social-advertising effort. Coke, to put it bluntly, threw Facebook under the bus, essentially shirking away from their own role in the Beacon controversy, much like 44 other partners who teamed up with Facebook. … Read the rest of this post

Recently, Nielsen/NetRatings revised the way it ranked top Web sites to include “time spent” in its ranking algorithm. I very much applaud this change, because it’s an extra level of information that will be circulated freely to give people additional ways to consider the rankings. When it comes to data, especially data for these sort of rankings that are used when making advertising decisions, more information flowing freely is definitely better, and incorporating information on how engaged visitors are with Web sites is a big improvement.

One of my major pet peeves is that marketers will seemingly always use bigger, less meaningful (or completely meaningless) numbers when very meaningful, but smaller, numbers are available. The beauty of this for Nielsen/NetRatings is that the bigger number for time spent in some cases, especially for AOL and Yahoo, is actually meaningful.

While I don’t agree with Nielsen/NetRatings’ decision to completely abandon the page view measurement, I do agree with the premise that page views are not always a reliable indicator. However, I’m a more-information-is-better information guy, so my preference would have been to include visitors, time spent and page views. If there are properties with very high page views and hardly any time spent at all–i.e., views that average one second per page, people will figure out what to do with that data.

All numbers referenced are courtesy of Nielsen/NetRatings and are for home and work panels in the U.S. for the month of May. Here is the release with the data tables.

I love that the data-measurement companies exist. What I don’t like is what often seems like unnecessary confusion these companies sometimes cause. In its press release Nielsen/NetRatings included two tables, and there are some things that don’t sit well with me.

In the top-10 ranking table, all AOL properties are rolled in together, and all Yahoo properties are, but YouTube is broken out of Google’s total. Since Google owns YouTube, this doesn’t seem like an apples-to-apples measuring and causes exactly the sort of BS confusion I hate to see bandied about.

For the month of May, Google properties (minus YouTube) had almost 20 million more unique visitors than AOL properties (110.2 million vs. 91.6 million), but even with about 20 million fewer visitors, more than three times as much time was spent on AOL properties (25 billion minutes for AOL versus 7.4 billion minutes for Google).

While Google is continuing to stomp on Yahoo with basically three times the volume, traffic and time spent for search, when comparing all of Yahoo’s properties to all of Google’s properties (minus YouTube), an interesting thing happens. Yahoo is very close to Google in total visitors (107.6 million), but visitors to Yahoo’s properties are much more engaged, spending more than twice as much time (19.6 billion minutes).

Disclosure: I had already thought Yahoo was not fairly valued relative to its massive scale and mostly on the strength of everybody, including my pal Kara Swisher beating up on those crazy kids in Sunnyvale so much, I recently purchased 1,000 shares of Yahoo in my IRA. (It’s currently underwater by about 30 cents a share, but I am looking at this as a 10-year-or-longer hold).

My first reaction to the new data was, “Wow, Facebook isn’t a top-10 property based on minutes, but MySpace with over 7.5 billion minutes is!”

I’m being sarcastic; I’m not at all surprised about Facebook not being in the top 10 in May. While I do not know how many billions (or even hundreds of millions) of minutes Facebook had in May, I know that according to Nielsen/NetRatings top-10 minutes for May, it was less than 2.1 billion (No. 10 You Tube). In fairness though, I’d predict if I had access to all the data, when the numbers for July are released in a couple of months, Facebook will have shown growth and MySpace probably won’t, though it’s much easier to have double-digit growth off a smaller base.

Some additional points I’ll wind up pondering a little:

• If I read the two tables correctly, there is hardly any usage at all in the Fox Interactive Media properties outside of MySpace. While I’m not surprised MySpace is by a large margin Fox’s biggest property, I am surprised that MySpace accounted for 96% of the overall minutes. May was television sweeps; this shows that relatively speaking nobody streamed “24″ or any of Fox’s other shows via Fox TV’s Web site. I suppose I’m not terribly surprised by that, either.
• Gamers are extremely engaged. Electronic Arts Online was No. 8 on the list with 3.5 billion minutes. The fascinating aspect of that to me is EA Online racked up all those minutes with only 8.5 million visitors. Contrast that with YouTube’s 2.1 billion minutes on 48.2 million visitors.
• How valuable is this list in terms of valuing the properties or making ad buys? The data are good to have, but beyond the top five or six properties, I’m not sure how useful this list is. Minutes and level of engagement matter, but when it comes to ability to sell advertising, reach (number of visitors) is still extremely critical.
• If, for example, EA Online’s numbers include access to its site via Xbox Live and its highly used forum discussions, that’s a lot of time spent on content that doesn’t include any advertising.

While the new measurement raises many questions, and it may take a while to get everyone on the same page, I view it as positive progress and think in many instances the minutes data are very useful–though again, I would still continue to include page views as well. More information, even if it includes inflated page-view numbers, is still better than less information.

Over time, these new measurements will help us better figure out how to value Web properties, but there are many things to beware of when it comes to “top 10” lists. Minutes aren’t the actual measure of value unless you can make money with those minutes, and even within this, one must be careful.

MySpace has huge minutes, but its ads are all by Google! Google is making money on MySpace, and MySpace (or Facebook for that matter) isn’t making nearly as much for its ads as AOL or Yahoo, because it uses a third party (the same is of course true for Facebook). Also, these rankings might lead one to believe that EA Online is a more valuable property than, say, ESPN or the New York Times, and I don’t believe that is true at all, though the numbers do indicate EA Online is probably more valuable than people had previously considered.

The numbers do help, but you’ll still need to think about them carefully.