Yahoo agreed to settle a click fraud lawsuit and gave a judge the responsibility of determining advertisers refunds. Yahoo will pay nearly $5 million in court costs and promises to work more closely on identifying click fraud.

Per the agreement there is no limit to Yahoo's liability, so it is unclear if it will cost the company more than the paltry $90 million that Google is required to pay as part of its click fraud settlement.

Having a second search engine agree to settle acknowledges the reality of the click fraud problem and hopefully will lead to more transparency in the accounting practices. Let's bring in an auditing firm (preferably one with a clean record) that understands Web traffic analysis to gauge just how messy today's record keeping is.

What do you get when you put Wikipedia, Shopping.com and YouTube in a blender?

ShopWiki.com, which just added user-generated product review videos to its site.

The company is paying for $50 each for the first 500 reviews, which might skew the recommendations towards the safe and mostly positive so that they get approval. While the democratic nature of wikis could be a nice addition to provide theoretically unbiased review, the company might also be opening itself up for legal tussles should the reviews include false information.

The question of responsibility for hosting user generated content will be an interesting one to figure out. Should YouTube pay for defamatory content, or the person who posted it? UGC can be a great traffic builder and marketing tool, but it could come with a price.

Local advertising has been slow to grow, and I say search engines are to blame. While many folks search online to shop online, most do not, but are looking for the best place to buy something, be it local or otherwise.

Local ads are less than 8 percent of the online advertising spend, according to eMarketer. Why? The search engines aren't doing enough to promote local shopping. Google doesn't have the local search option on its homepage, which is unlike MSN, Yahoo, and Ask.

Also, when consumers type in a category and location, they should be given an option for the local store, which Yahoo and MSN do. Consumers should be able to compare local versus online purchase prices, and let the best store win.

While the other search engines and yellow page directories are useful for local search, Google is the first place many people go, and it needs to step up.

Found via Adotas.

Gaming sites could be the next horizon for video ads, according to the Washington Post.

RealNetworks is introducing video ads on its casual gaming site RealArcade. I'm surprised when I hear that puzzle games are being driven by the desperately bored housewives (women over 30). This makes for an attractive advertising audience, which Honda and Hasbro hope to capitalize on.

Since teens are wild for MySpace, dads are busy playing online poker while mom is playing sudoku, advertisers have to look online instead of on TV. Video ads are more interesting to watch than banners, especially for people who are accustomed to the interactivity of games.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. NBC, which only a few months ago was asking YouTube to cease and desist from displaying its content, has signed an agreement to advertise its new shows on YouTube.

YouTube's distribution of the Lazy Sunday skit from Saturday Night Live created an online sensation, and now NBC will advertise The Office, SNL and other shows on YouTube.

This will give YouTube some needed cash while legitimizing the value of its multimillion viewer audience. Even Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader of the House, is using YouTube to distribute debates from the halls of Congress, and what's more, thousands of people are watching.

You can expect that more video publishers as well as print media will start requiring users to watch a video ad for free access to content.

Found via Adotas.

I'm not the only one who thinks that youth-oriented social networking sites may not bring the financial rewards that one would expect from having 10's of millions of users.

Stock guru Henry Blodget agrees that MySpace is currently a money loser and likely won't do much of anything to improve Fox' bottom line.

The bigger the audience, the more bandwidth and storage resources are required, which costs real money to maintain. Will advertisers pay much to run ads against a 13 year old's ranting on life in middle school?

Also, just wait until the first successful lawsuit against MySpace after some sex offender harms a teen. MySpace is addressing the security and privacy issues, but the potential payouts (even if the lackadaisical parents really are to blame) could be huge.

Like Trix, social networking may be for kids today, but they'll move on, and the survivors will be focused on services for grownups.

Back and May MSN adCenter blogger Carolyn jumped the gun a little bit in her annoucement that adLabs was live and open for business, and this time I bear her to the annoucement. Microsoft's research site, MSN adLab. , is finally live, for real this time!

I really love the information this thing provides, and if we could tap into an API it would be even better, although I don't see that coming anytime soon. A little tidbit I found using the demographics tool is that only Females use Google. See for yourself by typing in Google or http://www.google.com into the tool here. Hey all you "males" out there, is there something you are hiding from us? The data doesn't lie ;)

*Disclaimer* I know this is a new tool and as it gets more data we should see some amazing information. Take that Google Trends!

Google continues to grow more powerful, according to the latest numbers from comScore Media Metrix.

Between April and May Google's search market share rose by one percent while its biggest three competitors remained basically flat.

So what could slow Google's march? The release of Windows Vista could give Microsoft a temporary lift as some who buy new PCs or upgrade their OS will want to give the new IE and MSN Search a spin. The RSS reader built into IE will win back some Firefox users, but if I were Microsoft I'd integrate RSS into search pronto.

As browsing RSS feeds becomes a daily routine for more people, being able to search the feeds will become more important. Scanning more than 30-40 RSS feeds can take up a good part of your morning, so prioritizing results that come for your feeds as part of search would speed things up. For example, you want to hear the latest interest rate news, so you do a search and results from your "trusted" sources such as the WSJ or LA Times come first.

Yahoo and eBay's tag team could win over some of the shopping oriented searches. By giving accurate results from eBay, Shopping.com and Half.com, Yahoo could become the default product search engine.