Increasing the click through rate by finding the most relevant ads is a never-ending challenge for ad networks. Entrieva offers ClickSense as an Adsense alternative and claims a two to five times increase in revenue.

But often the ads that might generate the highest volume of clicks are indirectly related to the content or keyword at hand. There have been many studies saying that click rates are lower when they talk about the exact content of the page -- for example, reading about skis may not generate the highest yield for ski boot ads.

With this knowledge in mind, why aren't ad networks doing a better job offering the best performing related categories of ads? If you are reading about skiing, you might be more interested in all wheel drive car rentals or hotel discounts packages.

Publishers sell display ads against their content like this, so why not contextual advertising? Contextual ads could go even broader to find the most likely unrelated items that someone might want to purchase based on demographic information. For example, skiers may also be the most likely people to buy satellite radios or accounting services, so they should be added into the mix.

Relevancy is relative.

Google is now indexing YouTube videos as part of its Video Search but won't fuse the services together, according to MediaPost.

This makes sense because Google wants video search to remain an open index of all video content, while YouTube is the guide to its uploaded videos.

However, they could to more to leverage their assets by allowing YouTubers who don't find what they want a link to then search Google Video. If they aren't already in the process of doing so, Google needs to merge advertising operations between the sites so that they can maximize revenue. Advertising on Google Video may be a tougher sell, but the company should make the ads being uploaded to YouTube prominent on Search as well.

YouTube recognizes that watching Super Bowl ads online will be wildly popular and will host all of the ads after the game and invite viewers to rate the ads.

Google should consider offering some exclusive video content that is ad supported as well. Watch a Ford ad, and get to see something you'd otherwise have to pay for.

Pundits love to talk about market share and often assume that Yahoo is targeting Google and vice versa, but that strategy never works. A paper by Wharton marketing professor J. Scott Armstrong shows that focuses on competitors instead of profits is a losing proposition. The paper "Competitor-oriented Objectives: The Myth of Market Share" provide real world and laboratory data proving that market share should not be a company goal.

Companies that established objects aimed at stealing market share actual hurt profitability, according to the study.

"All of the correlations between competitor-oriented objectives and profits were negative, ranging from minus 0.28 to minus 0.73," the study says.

A recent example is Sony and Microsoft, which are going at each other in the console wars, while Nintendo has become the most profitable of the three.

This article is a good reminder that profitability, not bragging rights, is the endgame.

Some of the oldest news organizations in the country are remaking themselves in order to capture online advertising dollars.

The Los Angeles Times has discarded its age-old reporting process and is now an around the clock news reporting organization. The paper is training its reporters to become "Web journalists" including blogging and how to get stories posted online as quickly as possible, according to MediaPost.

The paper has seen is automotive print advertising cut by nearly half, and so far the online revenue increases aren't keeping up. Bloggers and news aggregators are stealing there readership, and the papers aren't about to take it sitting down.

The Washington Post is increasing the number of political blogs on its website ahead of the next presidential election cycle.

This means more inventory available from respected media companies for national and local advertisers alike.

Yahoo is set to introduce its new search advertising ranking algorithm, code-named Panama, in a few weeks, and the industry sure is taking notice. Including quality (gasp) along with the keyword bid cost should generate more revenue for Yahoo and make advertisers with relevant products and messaging happier since they can get a better placement and return.

Investors like the idea too, sending Yahoo's stock higher.

However, Yahoo should add some new twist on its search engine at the same time that Panama rolls out to maximize the buzz and garner more interest from users. Just as Panama can differentiate Yahoo from Google in advertising, Yahoo needs to do some serious product differentiation if it wants to take away some of Google's market share.

Perhaps customization could do the trick. Let users tweak their results to automatically blend Answers, News, Multimedia results, or track their searches so that more relevant searches are returned (they don't have an equivalent to Google History).

Streaming televisions shows online is good for everyone. It enables viewers to catch up on shows they missed, gives the producers a new revenue stream, and provides a desirable demographic for advertisers.

The broadband TV watch tends to be younger, better educated and more affluent than the average Joe, according to a report from Nielsen Analytics. The report says that viewers prefer short pre-roll ads to being interrupted during a broadcast.

The report also says that people who watch broadband content watch more TV than before. NBC proved the point by streaming popular show Heroes, and despite the return of mega-hit 24 from hiatus, Heroes won the ratings battle on Monday night.

NBC has added a video stream of actor's comments about the episdoe (similar to what is on DVDs) to keep people coming back for more. Heroes online has the normal commercial breaks, but instead of several minutes, you are back to the program in 30 seconds. I forgot to TiVo the show this week and was not bothered by the commercials in the least when I watched it online.

So soon TV networks will have to start giving their online ad sales some serious attention as the number of streams is likely to grow.

Google might as well have just redirected all their image searches to Live.com's image search since they just about completely ripped Live's image search interface. Barry reports the changes on SearchEngineLand and SERoundtable but fails to mention that this new interface he likes so much is the same as Live.com's. Google Blogscoped has a before and after of Google's interface here but here is a screenshot of Google vs Live. See for yourself.

SpiralFrog, the much hyped website that aspired to create the first free music download service, is on its last legs. The CEO and several board members and key executives have all recently jumped ship, and they aren't answering the phone, according to News.com.

SpiralFrog never scored deals with the necessary music labels, and the launch has been pushed back. Now with the leadership eviscerated, SpiralFrog's bad idea is fully laid bare for all to see, like the entrails of a high school biology lab.

The plan of allowing people to download songs for free and hoping that a website could generate sufficient traffic to support the cost of the royalties was dead on arrival, as I said when they first started making news.

The ad-supported model works fine for general interest broadcasts, but copyright holders will ask a pretty penny for companies that want to give away content outright. We can officially start the SpiralFrog deathwatch.

A new search engine hopes to attract advertisers by touting click-fraud prevention technology. Winning over users from Google et al is another story.

Megaglobe put out a press release in advance of its launch claiming that the search engine would protect advertisers through "Pay Per Valid Click" technology, but they did not give any details about how it works.

If nothing else the promise of giving "far more assured value for money" could give the top tier engines motivation to more aggressively address click fraud. I'd like to see some advertisers test out Megaglobe and see if they get a better return on their investment.

A consulting firm in the U.K. claims to have won a lawsuit against a major search engine for click fraud, but the company refused to name names. How sad is it that companies are afraid to speak out against search engines for fear of reprisal?

One of my favorite blogging sites, Performancing, is shutting down its last project, Performancing Partners. Partners was a basic ad network that was supposed to subsidize the other Performancing projects, but after a busted deal with PayPerPost, Chris Garret has decided to close up shop.

PP was a good product but in my opinion was nothing out of the ordinary blog network that had potential to be great. They had the professional blogger background, a great following, and a stats package to track it all. What they didn't have was something to differentiate themselves from everyone else. I know hindsight is 20/20 and its to point out what should have been done but I am going to do it anyway.

My ideal blog ad network has all of the features and functionality of a Performancing Partners but the logistics would be different. Rather then selling ads on a per site basis, blogs should be grouped into category and ads distributed throughout those categories. I'm sure there are a lot of fine details to work out but the basic theory is this. Rather than creating your typical exclusive top down blog network where only the biggest and best blogs are allowed to make money, all bloggers big and small have the opportunity to make money. Its the Wal-Mart theory of blog networks.

Consider Wal-Mart as the blog network. Wal-Mart's primary target is not the high income people a.k.a the A-list bloggers, its the low-middle class citizens who want the one stop shop and easy way out. This describes the everyday blogger, they have a blog but don't know how or have the intiative to make money from it, they want a one stop shop. Its this in my opinion that has made Adsense to popular. But with my blog ad network, you wouldn't have to worry about the click fraud.

Here's the breakdown in case my rambling didn't make sense

Wal-Mart = Blog Network
Wal-Mart's demographic = Low to Middle class
Low to Middle class = My Blog Network Demographic
Low to Middle class = all the non A-list bloggers

There is a huge segment of bloggers out there not be capitalized on because the "blogosphere" is too focused on the A-listers and not about the larger opportunity out there.

If you can't figure out which online video site to advertise, start your own. Anheuser-Busch will launch Bud.TV after the Super Bowl.

The advertiser is getting into the content biz, hiring Warner Brothers to create a game show called "Hardly News" about current events as part of a seven TV channel lineup that will include standup comedy and independent films.

Acquiring the expertise to do quality programming is expensive and very difficult to achieve (just ask the CW). A-B would have been better off sponsoring a YouTube comedy channel where the audience is already there.

Kids however, won't be able to play on the website as the company is developing an age identification system in collaboration with Aristotle Inc.

Anheuser-Busch has an astounding 48.8 percent share of U.S. beer sales, which along with American Idol reinforces all of the stereotypes that people outside of the country have about America's lack of taste.

The Big 3 automakers are cutting their print advertising while investing more online. This shift is indicative of the need for marketers of considered purchases to establish relationships, which is best done interactively online.

Advertising Age has the story of Detroit pulling out more than $100 million from Time Inc.'s print ads, forcing the company to lay off many workers.

Media companies that are increasing their online content are gobbling up much of the shifting revenue as newspapers are seeing growth to their blogs grow by more than 200 percent.

Nissan is one several automakers that is advertising against a media company's online play to establish a relationship with a desirable demographic. Nissan's Versa is sponsoring unique content that NBC is creating in support of its Heroes show that is very popular with a younger demographic. As I've said in before, providing unique content is the best way to build community around a TV show.

For people to spend six figures on a purchase, marketers need to cultivate that relationship and tell a story, and what better way to do that then online? It is much easier to monitor repeated interactions with a brand or acquire email addresses online, so look for big ticket item sellers (cars, furniture, boats) to be spending more and more of their money online. The media companies that do the best job of targeting consumers will win the lions share of their business.

Chalk this one up to another idea I had ages ago but didn't think enough to act on it, in-video-game ads. If I was smart enough to act on it, I could be making a pretty penny because apparently Google thinks its a pretty good idea and they are looking to get into the space. Google is rumored to be talking to in-video-game ad company Adscape but it makes me wonder if they are reacting to Microsoft's acquisition of Massive.

I personally love video games and think that these in game ads can have a significant influence especially for branding. I believe it was energy drink Bawls that was the modern day pioneer into video game advertising and quickly became a gamer staple at the then popular Lan Parties.

I'm not exactly sure how it would work but don't be surprised to wake up one morning, fire up your favorite game (Gears of War) and see a Google billboard. I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd fire a few shots at it just for principle.

[CNN Money]