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Although General Motors has decided that social-media advertising is not right for its business, a new study seems to indicate that few other companies agree.

Local-media consulting firm BIA/Kelsey yesterday revealed that U.S. social-media ad spending is expected to hit $9.8 billion by 2016, up from $3.8 billion last year. This year, companies are expected to spend $4.8 billion on social-network advertising.

BIA/Kelsey's findings come at a time when one of the largest companies in the world, General Motors, is calling Facebook advertising into question. In a report yesterday, The Wall Street Journal … Read more

Yesterday, word broke that General Motors ended $10 million in Facebook ad spending after determining the ads didn't work for it. The timing of the original WSJ story on the subject was spectacular, coming as it did just three days before Facebook's IPO.

Now folks sympathetic to Facebook are firing back at the automaker, saying GM ran a lousy Facebook campaign and ignored the social network's advice. Which is not terribly surprising when you think about it, since the GM story has ignited a wider debate about the utility of corporate ad spending on Facebook at about … Read more

A change and clarification in Facebook's Data Use Policy is reminding potential investors that the company may roll out an advertising service that will display ads to Facebook users when they're not actually on Facebook. This would be a direct play for Google's main revenue stream.

Changes to the data use policy are explained in a 2,800-word document. In the "advertising" section, Facebook says, "We're also clarifying our existing disclosure that we might show ads off Facebook to explain that, if we showed these ads, they may or may not include social … Read more

Today we'll take a critical look at the way people respond to celebrity deaths in the wake of Maurice Sendak, Adam Yauch, and Vidal Sassoon. We'll take you through the five typical stages of "grief" based on what Vice Magazine calls the Facebook Death Patrol.

We also have some bad news to report to children of millennials: your parents are still getting it on, and they're probably using a smartphone at the same time. A survey from Meredith's Parent Network questioned 1,000 moms born between 1977 and 1994 and found that 21 percent of them used their smartphones in the bathroom, while an astounding 12 percent admitted to using them in coitus! Sorry if we just ruined your day, kids.… Read more

What feature have viewers been waiting for since the "beginning of television?"

According to Dish, it's commercial-free TV, and it's added a new "Auto Hop" feature to its Hopper HD DVR system that allows you to jump over all commercials in recorded prime-time programs from ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC when viewed a day after airing. … Read more

Just one month ago, Tumblr CEO David Karp announced that displaying ads was the "complete last resort" for the microblogging service. Well, financial temptation must have gotten the better of him.

Tumblr announced the introduction of Tumblr Radar and Tumblr Spotlight today, which are two types of advertising products available to sponsors for an entry-level price of $25,000, according to VentureBeat. Although this is an about-face to what Karp said last month, there are still some conditions for potential advertisers.

First, the advertisers must be "approved" by Tumblr. Second, they must be willing to shell … Read more

A rare, internal video that Apple originally aired during its 1984 international sales conference has been put online.

Networkworld today posted a full version of the 9-minute film, which shows an exuberant -- and costumed -- Steve Jobs and other early Apple execs staging a World War II-style assault on tech rival IBM, just ahead of launching the first Macintosh.

In it, Apple stages a multi-front attack against IBM, saving office zombies from the mundane with Macs that can talk. Jobs also dons full suit, bow-tie, cigarette, and gray hair coloring to look like Franklin Delano Roosevelt No really.… Read more

Privacy concerns have been at the top of many tech industry reports lately. Between Apple's Flashback Trojan issues, Google's faux pas with Safari privacy settings, and a myriad of other privacy-related stories, consumers, lawmakers, and the media have been pressing for greater privacy restrictions.

Partly in response to a Congressional inquiry, Apple has begun restricting access to consumers' UDID numbers, a unique identifier that individually accounts for all iOS devices Apple sells.

Ad servers, like MoPub, have been using UDIDs to serve particular ads to targeting demographics for years. Now that Apple has begun rejecting apps that continue … Read more

Video is moving to the Web in enormous leaps; the promise of online video seems to be at our doorstep. Millions are cutting the cord, beloved television shows are returning through the seemingly divine intervention of online distribution, and people are consuming Web and mobile video in increasingly staggering numbers.

But all that video consumption is saddled with a burden that's keeping it from reaching its full potential: the ads just haven't caught up.

You all know the problem I'm talking about, and yes, you've seen it on our own site -- on videos hosted by … Read more