Newspapers, already facing a grim economic forecast, are digesting another piece of bad news: the growth in online advertising they saw as their salvation has slowed to a crawl.

In the last few years, newspaper companies have been rapidly expanding their Web presence — adding blogs, photo slide shows and podcasts — in the belief that more features would bring more advertisers. But now, after 17 quarters of ballooning growth, online revenue at newspaper sites is falling. In the second quarter, it was down 2.4 percent compared with last year, to $777 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America. It was the only year-over-year drop since the group began measuring online revenue in 2003.

Overall online advertising, however, is strong. Display advertising, the graphics-rich ads that newspaper sites carry, grew 7.6 percent in the second quarter, TNS Media Intelligence reported.

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I found Panda Security Malaysia in the exhibition of Microsoft Tech.Ed 2008.

Now I am using the Panda Internet Security 2008 with Mega Detection, thanks to Panda for the complimentary 1 year user license.

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Yahoo has struck an agreement with LucidMedia in a move to enhance contextual display advertising on its Right Media Exchange, the companies announced Tuesday.

The arrangement comes as Yahoo and its competitors, which rely heavily on ad revenue, face a challenging environment as the economy softens and advertisers pull back. With the agreement, Yahoo is seeking to grab market share from Google and Microsoft.

Under the agreement, Yahoo’s Right Media will support buyers and sellers that use LucidMedia’s contextual advertising engine ClickSense. The arrangement will allow Right Media users to categorize their display advertising inventory, using targeted tags for any of Yahoo’s more than 60 vertical channels, such as automotive, finance, and sports.

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AOL in US is shutting down some of its Web and mobile based services because it is not gaining enough attention in the US.

I think that AOL should look in other parts of the world for new business opportunity. For an example, service like Xdrive and AOL Pictures that it plan to shut down will work in Asia since there are not many such services based in Asia.

If AOL could launch services such as Xdrive and host it in Asia, users will definitely use it since it is localized and the files that users are uploading and downloading don’t have to travel across the other part of the world(US), thus ensuring good user experience.

The world is changing, even bigger companies like Yahoo! is trying get attention in Asia with localized services and partnership.

It is time for AOL to look out the box, if not, AOL will disappear within the next few years.

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Malaysia’s local daily newspaper, TheStar, now serves video ads on its website.

TheStar.com.my has about 50 million pageviews a month, according to Alexa.com, and it serves video ads. As far as i know, Malaysiakini.com, the most visited news portal in this country has 100 million page views but I have not seen any video ads on it.

The problem with video ads is that, it requires a lot of bandwidth and even broadband users in this country will have to wait longer to load a page with video on it. Plus, the video ads on TheStar’s website plays automatically, it is even more super(hebat) than Google’s Video Ads which requires users to click on it before it plays.

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In announcing a new service for media buyers on Tuesday, Google said that its Ad Planner was meant to make life easier for the people whose job it is to identify Web sites where their clients’ messages will have the most impact.

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