Social media is quickly altering the way consumers make purchase decisions, according to a new study by shopping comparison site PriceGrabber. While the research focused on retailers, the lessons are equally critical for players across the interactive media space. eMarketer has the full report. Highlights:

Generation Y (those…

Ad spending for online video will grow to over $3 billion by 2012. That’s good news for interactive, classified and entertainment Web sites, but it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the $70 billion TV market.

EMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey, speaking about the future of online video at last month's IAB MIXX expo, explained that the greatest increases for online video…

You know those annoying ads that pop up over a Web page and that you have to either sit through or click the “Skip Ad” box? Well, they’re not going away any time soon. A new report from Dynamic Logic shows that consumers feel the "appropriate" number of ads that appear over the content of Web pages is two per hour. This number is consistent with the results for the same question asked in previous surveys conducted…

A new report from Bernstein Research out today predicts the financial markets crisis will hit newspapers particularly hard. As reported in Media Post, some 21 percent of newspaper ads - particularly for national brands like The Wall Street Journal and…

Genius or desperation? They say there's a fine line between the two.

Microsoft launched Search Perks, sort of a frequent-flyer program intended to create incentives for people to use its MSN search engine.

If you sign up for the program, you gain "tickets" each time you conduct a search on Live, with a per-day maximum of 25. The tickets are redeemable as discounts on music, books, clothing, games and travel.

When you're a distant No. 3 behind Google and Yahoo,…

Here's a pretty cool resource for companies looking to expand globally, and carefully picking which countries to get involved with, and even which regions of countries to go into.

The World Bank has a resource that, in their words, "provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 181 economies and selected cities at the subnational and regional level."

For example, did you know that the easiest country in…

There's an interesting story in The New York Times that covers for a general audience what it's like to be hunting for a job this day and age. There aren't any particular revelations in the article for the AIMGroup's audience. But it's a pretty good account of all the factors that frustrate job-seekers…

A follow-up thought from our coverage of the Newspaper Consortium in CIR 918 (clients only). This  is strictly my own opinion and may or may not reflect anyone else's around AIM Group:  Yahoo's new APT platform merits a serious look by newspapers.

I can see situations where this program is a no-brainer.  I can…

We've reported this trend recently, but it's worth underscoring: An estimated 25 percent of U.S. auto dealers are using online video, AdAge quoted AutoTrader.com.

Why? Because it's cheap to produce, and most importantly, dealers can measure results. Average cost of a walk-around video of a car is about $80, compared to a $2,000-$15,000 price for a 30-second spot on TV.

We would caution, however,…

I’ll admit that when I first heard about Twitter, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world. As a journalist and a long time blogger, I take pride in crafting a well thought out story, with a beginning, middle and end, and a common theme running throughout.

So the idea of “micro-blogging” in bursts of no more than 140 characters at a time, as you do on Twitter, seemed to me to be entirely untenable.…