The term adware frequently refers to any software which displays advertisements, whether or not it does so with the user’s consent. Programs such as the Eudora mail client display advertisements as an alternative to shareware registration fees. These classify as “adware” in the sense of advertising-supported software, but not as spyware. They do not operate surreptitiously or mislead the user.

Many of the programs frequently classified as spyware function as adware in a different sense: their chief observed behavior consists of displaying advertising. Claria Corporation’s Gator Software and Exact Advertising’s BargainBuddy provide examples of this sort of program. Visited Web sites frequently install Gator on client machines in a surreptitious manner, and it directs revenue to the installing site and to Claria by displaying advertisements to the user. The user experiences a large number of pop-up advertisements.

Other spyware behaviors, such as reporting on websites the user visits, frequently accompany the displaying of advertisements. Monitoring web activity aims at building up a marketing profile on users in order to sell “targeted” advertisement impressions. The prevalence of spyware has cast suspicion upon other programs that track Web browsing, even for statistical or research purposes. Some observers describe the Alexa Toolbar, an Internet Explorer plug-in published by Amazon.com, as spyware (and some anti-spyware programs report it as such) although many users choose to install it.

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AFP - Linden Lab chief executive Mark Kingdon shakes his head when he sees news stories heralding the demise of former Internet darling Second Life.

AP - IAC/InterActiveCorp said Friday that it was notified by The Nasdaq Stock Market that is not in compliance with a Nasdaq rule that requires the Internet services company to have an audit committee that includes at least three independent directors.

Messaging spam, sometimes termed spim (a portmanteau of spam and IM, short for instant messenger), makes use of instant messaging systems, such as AOL Instant Messenger or ICQ. Many IM systems offer a directory of users, including demographic information such as age and sex. Advertisers can gather this information, sign on to the system, and send unsolicited messages. To send instant messages to millions of users on most IM services merely requires scriptable software and the recipients’ IM usernames. Spammers have similarly targeted Internet Relay Chat channels, using IRC bots that join channels and bombard them with advertising messages. Because most IM protocols are proprietary, it is easier to enact unilateral changes to make spamming more difficult.

A similar sort of spam can be sent with the Messenger Service in Microsoft Windows. The Messenger Service is an SMB facility intended to allow servers to send pop-up alerts to a Windows workstation. When Windows systems are connected to the Internet with this service running and without an adequate firewall, it can be used to send spam. The Messenger Service can, however, be easily disabled. [1]

Messenger service spam, in particular, has lent itself to spammer use in a particularly circular scheme. In many cases, messenger spammers send messages to vulnerable Windows machines consisting of text like “Annoyed by these messages? Visit this site.” The link leads to a Web site where, for a fee, users are told how to disable the Windows messenger service. Though the messenger service is easily disabled for free by the user, this scam works because it creates a perceived need and then offers an immediate solution. Oftentimes, the only “annoying messages” the user is receiving through Messenger are advertisements to disable Messenger itself.

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Reuters - An activist with a pro-Kremlin youth group said Thursday he and his friends were behind an electronic attack on Estonia two years ago that paralyzed the NATO state’s Internet network.

Reuters - Time Warner Inc on Thursday named Google executive Tim Armstrong to lead AOL, in what was seen as a bold move to reverse the fortunes of the struggling Internet unit in preparation for a spin-off.

Google was started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new concept to evaluating web pages. This concept, called PageRank, has been from the start important to the Google algorithm [1]. PageRank relies heavily on incoming links and uses the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page’s value. The more incoming links a page had the more “worthy” it is. The value of each incoming link itself varies directly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page.

With help from PageRank, Google proved to be very good at serving relevant results. Google became the most popular and successful search engine. Because PageRank measured an off-site factor, Google felt it would be more difficult to manipulate than on-page factors.

But manipulated it was. Webmasters had already developed link manipulation tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine. These methods proved to be equally applicable to Google’s algorithm. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links on a massive scale. PageRank’s reliance on the link as a vote of confidence in a page’s value was undermined as many webmasters sought to garner links purely to influence Google into sending them more traffic, irrespective of whether the link was useful to human site visitors.

It was time for Google—and other search engines—to look at a wider range of off-site factors. There were other reasons to develop more intelligent algorithms. The Internet was reaching a vast population of non-technical users who were often unable to use advanced querying techniques to reach the information they were seeking and the sheer volume and complexity of the indexed data was vastly different from that of the early days. Search engines had to develop predictive, semantic, linguistic and heuristic algorithms.

A proxy for the PageRank metric is still displayed in the Google Toolbar, but PageRank is only one of more than 100 factors that Google considers in ranking pages.

Today, most search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret. A search engine may use hundreds of factors in ranking the listings on its SERPs; the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually.

Much current SEO thinking on what works and what doesn’t is largely speculation and informed guesses. Some SEOs have carried out controlled experiments to gauge the effects of different approaches to search optimization.

The following, though, are some of the considerations search engines could be building into their algorithms, and the list of Google patents [2] may give some indication as to what is in the pipeline:

• Age of site
• Length of time domain has been registered
• Age of content
• Regularity with which new content is added
• Age of link and reputation of linking site
• Standard on-site factors
• Negative scoring for on-site factors (for example, a dampening for sites with extensive keyword meta tags indicative of having being SEO-ed)
• Uniqueness of content
• Related terms used in content (the terms the search engine associates as being related to the main content of the page)
• Google Pagerank (Only used in Google’s algorithm)
• External links, the anchor text in those external links and in the sites/pages containing those links
• Citations and research sources (indicating the content is of research quality)
• Stem-related terms in the search engine’s database (finance/financing)
• Incoming backlinks and anchor text of incoming backlinks
• Negative scoring for some incoming backlinks (perhaps those coming from low value pages, reciprocated backlinks, etc.)
• Rate of acquisition of backlinks: too many too fast could indicate “unnatural” link buying activity
• Text surrounding outward links and incoming backlinks. A link following the words “Sponsored Links” could be ignored
• Use of “rel=nofollow” to suggest that the search engine should ignore the link
• Depth of document in site
• Metrics collected from other sources, such as monitoring how frequently users hit the back button when SERPs send them to a particular page
• Metrics collected from sources like the Google Toolbar, Google AdWords/Adsense programs, etc.
• Metrics collected in data-sharing arrangements with third parties (like providers of statistical programs used to monitor site traffic)
• Rate of removal of incoming links to the site
• Use of sub-domains, use of keywords in sub-domains and volume of content on sub-domains… and negative scoring for such activity
• Semantic connections of hosted documents
• Rate of document addition or change
• IP of hosting service and the number/quality of other sites hosted on that IP
• Other affiliations of linking site with the linked site (do they share an IP? have a common postal address on the “contact us” page?)
• Technical matters like use of 301 to redirect moved pages, showing a 404 server header rather than a 200 server header for pages that don’t exist, proper use of robots.txt
• Hosting uptime
• Whether the site serves different content to different categories of users (cloaking)
• Broken outgoing links not rectified promptly
• Unsafe or illegal content
• Quality of HTML coding, presence of coding errors
• Actual click through rates observed by the search engines for listings displayed on their SERPs
• Hand ranking by humans of the most frequently accessed SERPs

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Reuters - Are you spending hours and hours on Facebook? If so, you are not alone.

Reuters - The WB.com has picked up an online horror series starring Jessica “LonelyGirl15″ Rose.

 Paying people to hold signs is one of the oldest forms of advertising, as with this Human directional pictured above

Commercial advertising media can include wall paintings, billboards (outdoor advertising), street furniture components, printed flyers, radio, cinema and television ads, web banners, web popups, skywriting, bus stop benches, magazines, newspapers, town criers, sides of buses, taxicab doors and roof mounts, musical stage shows, subway platforms and trains, elastic bands on disposable diapers, stickers on apples in supermarkets, the opening section of streaming audio and video, and the backs of event tickets and supermarket receipts. Any place an “identified” sponsor pays to deliver their message through a medium is advertising.

Covert advertising embedded in other entertainment media is known as product placement. A more recent version of this is advertising in film, by having a main character use an item or other of a definite brand - an example is in the movie Minority Report, where Tom Cruise’s character Tom Anderton owns a computer with the Nokia logo clearly written in the top corner, or his watch engraved with the Bulgari logo. Another example of advertising in film is in I, Robot, where main character played by Will Smith mentions his Converse shoes several times, calling them “classics,” because the film is set far in the future.

The TV commercial is generally considered the most effective mass-market advertising format and this is reflected by the high prices TV networks charge for commercial airtime during popular TV events. The annual Super Bowl football game in the United States is known as much for its commercial advertisements as for the game itself, and the average cost of a single thirty-second TV spot during this game has reached $2.5 million (as of 2006).

Virtual advertisements may be inserted into regular television programming through computer graphics. It is typically inserted into otherwise blank backdrops[1] or used to replace local billboards that are not relevant to the remote broadcast audience[2]. More controversially, virtual billboards may be inserted into the background[3] where none existing in real-life. Virtual product placement is also possible[4][5].

Increasingly, other mediums such as those discussed below are overtaking television due to a shift towards consumer’s usage of the Internet as well as devices such as TiVo.

Advertising on the World Wide Web is a recent phenomenon. Prices of Web-based advertising space are dependent on the “relevance” of the surrounding web content and the traffic that the website receives.

E-mail advertising is another recent phenomenon. Unsolicited bulk E-mail advertising is known as “spam”.

Some companies have proposed to place messages or corporate logos on the side of booster rockets and the International Space Station. Controversy exists on the effectiveness of subliminal advertising, and the pervasiveness of mass messages.

 A DBAG Class 101 with UNICEF ads at Ingolstadt main railway station

Unpaid advertising (also called word of mouth advertising), can provide good exposure at minimal cost. Personal recommendations (”bring a friend”, “sell it by zealot”), spreading buzz, or achieving the feat of equating a brand with a common noun (”Xerox” = “photocopier”, “Kleenex” = tissue, “Vaseline” = petroleum jelly, “Kotex” = tampons, “Maxi pads” = sanitary napkins, “Scotch Tape” = Clear Tape, “Band-aid” = bandage, “Visine” = eye drops, “Q-tips” = cotton swabs, “Rollerblades” = inline skates) — these must provide the stuff of fantasy to the holder of an advertising budget.

The most common method for measuring the impact of mass media advertising is the use of the rating point (rp) or the more accurate target rating point (trp). These two measures refer to the percentage of the universe of the existing base of audience members that can be reached by the use of each media outlet in a particular moment in time. The difference between the two is that the rating point refers to the percentage to the entire universe while the target rating point refers to the percentage to a particular segment or target. This becomes very useful when focusing advertising efforts on a particular group of people. For example, think of an advertising campaign targeting a female audience aged 25 to 45. While the overall rating of a TV show might be well over 10 rating points it might very well happen that the same show in the same moment of time is generating only 2.5 trps (being the target: women 25-45). This would mean that while the show has a large universe of viewers it is not necessarily reaching a large universe of women in the ages of 25 to 45 making it a less desirable location to place an ad for an advertiser looking for this particular demographic.

 A bus with an advertisement for GAP in Singapore. Buses and other vehicles are popular mediums for advertisers.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.