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When Glam Media raised $84.6 million in February, international expansion was on its radar, and now we're seeing the results: the women's-focused ad network announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Monetise, a London-based digital-ad sales start-up.

(Yes, that's British spelling.)

All Monetise employees will become part of Glam under the deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed.

"The acquisition of Monetise speeds our entry into the important U.K. display ad market," Glam Chairman and CEO Samir Arora said in a release. "Monetise has strong relationships with London advertising agencies and … Read more

Blog aggregation start-up Technorati will be launching an ad network later on Tuesday called "Technorati Media," TechCrunch reported. This marks a new direction for the company, which has heretofore focused on blog search and directories.

As TechCrunch commenters note, this is not exactly revolutionary. Ad networks are everywhere. What makes Technorati Media different from a Glam Media or Federated Media is apparently the fact that it'll advertise on "the little guys" as well as high-traffic blogs, promising a better deal than Google's ubiquitous AdSense (it's similar to what Six Apart is doing).

There … Read more

eBay has pulled the plug on Media Marketplace, a controversial pilot program designed to buy and sell radio and TV advertising on the Internet. The Internet auction house confirmed the closure of the program after one year with the brief message: "We have ended our pilot program in this market."

The system got off to a rocky start, receiving little support from the cable network industry and none at all from the broadcast networks, according to a report in AdWeek. The Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau refused to endorse the system, and only a few of its members--notably Oxygen and … Read more

This post was updated at 5:34 AM on Friday with comment from Facebook.

Finally, I can now do something about all those tacky speed-dating ads that show up on my Facebook profile. Blogger Rob Webb appears to have been the first to notice that the social network now allows members to rate the site's ads with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, you know, gladiator-style.

Facebook originally launched its "social ads" strategy last November, and privacy concerns over the controversial "Beacon" ads gave the program some pretty bad press. But this move is pretty innovative, and … Read more

This post was corrected to clarify when Adify was purchased by Cox Enterprises.

NEW YORK--Some have said that because of the wealth of personal information they store, social networks are the future of online advertising. Russ Fradin, co-founder and president of Adify, disagrees.

"Social networks, to date, what they've really done is drive performance-based CPMs down a lot," Fradin said in reference to the fact that a CPM (clicks per thousand impressions) rate of a dollar used to be considered low, but thanks to the influence of social networks, it's as low as three cents.

Fradin … Read more

Wanna buy a cute, cuddly Shih-tzu? How about a 1993 Chevy truck? A three-bedroom, two-bath house in Maryland?

Think Wal-Mart.

Wait a second before you decide the big-box retailer has gone gonzo with the concept of selling everything under the sun. It's actually testing the waters with a beta of free online classified ads.

The site, launched last week and powered by Oodle.com, carries more than 40 million listings because it taps into Oodle.com's already-existing postings. Start-up Oodle.com aggregates listings from more than 80,000 local and national sites.

Wal-Mart's free service allows sellers … Read more

This year's major update to user favorite Ad-Aware looks to be more of a course correction from some of the missteps in the 2007 version. The adware and malware detection engine has undergone a significant overhaul, resulting in faster scan times, and the interface has been changed.

The changes to the detection and removal engine will be noticeable to long-time Ad-Aware users, with Lavasoft touting faster scan times and better rootkit detection. New users should notice that the app performs faster than integrated antivirus and antimalware programs, and that's because only the paid version of Ad-Aware comes with … Read more

Google's top brass are meeting Monday to figure out a response to how Microsoft's new overtures toward Yahoo affect Google's potential ad deal with Yahoo.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, speaking to reporters at a Google Zeitgeist event in the U.K., said he's meeting with co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin on the matter, according to the Times Online. "After this press conference the three of us will meet and decide what our response is," Schmidt said.

Google and Yahoo have been discussing a partnership under which Google would supply some text ads … Read more

Google will open its ad network so certified partners can serve advertisements and track ad data--a move designed to make it easier for advertisers to run campaigns across multiple companies' networks.

"This will empower advertisers to work with approved third parties to serve and track display ads, including rich-media ads, across the Google content network through AdWords, giving them more options, flexibility and control over their campaigns," Rajas Moonka, senior business product manager, said Monday on Google's corporate blog.

The network had been closed, waiting for Google to build a mechanism to review ad compliance with Google … Read more