For the first time ever, Internet companies and ad agencies are starting to work together to develop ways to make money from the digital media. Unlikely other situations in the past ,that they used to compete all the time, they have decided to unify strength and come up with a solution.

The Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival was held last week in France where Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, and Steven Ballmer, chief executive at Microsoft attended for the first time an annual advertising industry meeting.

Mr. Paul Kemp-Robertson, editor of Contagious, an online magazine specialized on digital marketing trends, commented about the possible fusion of Internet companies and ad agencies:” There was an air of inevitability about it, because of the model not really working yet, and there’s so much content that will be dependent on it working.”

The Tribune Co. and the Dallas Morning News have recently closed an advertising deal in which the parent company of the Los Angeles Times will be in charge of selling print and online ads for the Texas paper.

The print media has been trying to find a way to increase revenues but due to the economical crisis subscribers have stopped buying print newspapers or subscribing online.

Don Meek, President of Tribune365 National Solution Group commented about this partnership:”We are going to take advantage of what we have built as a company to give advertisers access to the top markets in the U.S. You add Dallas to Chicago and Los Angeles and you have three of the top five markets in the country.”

Thanks to this deal, the Dallas Morning News will be able to get stronger in competing with advertisers based outside of the state.

The Nielsen report has released the information that Youtube’s online advertising revenues have grown 57% in the last two years, being this first quarter of 2009 the highest increase of the period.

The Consumer Goods companies have spent more money than before in this two years gap. This means that sales revenue went from $99.8million in the first quarter of 2007 to $156.2million in 2009 first quarter.

Mr. David Wiesenfeld, Vice President commented on the subject:“While direct response advertising has been very successful on the Internet, with categories like finance and travel devoting a significant portion of their budget to online advertising, on-line advertising will not continue to grow as rapidly without major brands beginning to devote larger portions of their ad budgets to the Web.”

He also added that they’re starting to see this to happen now with Consumer Packaged Goods companies.

There’s has recently been released the news that PointRoll and Tribune Media Services are going to launch an innovating online ad system.

This new system will be known as Channel Finder and it will allow users browsing the Internet the possibility to tune-in for information.

Apparently, representatives from the Discovery Channel, as well as the MLB Network, are two of the first companies to be registered to use this service. The new system will display video clips, interviews, interactive polls and games to capture viewer’s interest in other programs as well.

In a time of recession, the two giant search engines, Google and Yahoo, are fighting face to face to gain in the market for online advertising.

This past Monday, June 22nd, Yahoo unveiled what they called a “self-serve display advertising service”. This service will let business to create their own online ads. Yahoo is targeting small and local companies in need to promote their services.

On the other hand, Google is starting to test a new type of online ad that will feature product pricing and image.

The main idea is to show a richer product in the ads for those users that shop online regularly. These ads will be display only to certain users searching for specific products.

According to a new report that the social network Facebook Inc. has released, they have commented that the number of customers using their automated online-advertising system has tripled since last year.

The ads offer by Facebook Inc. are used by small and medium businesses in need to promote their services using text and photos.

Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director, commented about this new style of advertising that:”You basically just have a greater diversity of people using our ad system — lots of businesses, lots of local businesses finding success. “It’s really been a steady, successful growth pattern.”

Mr. Kendall refused to provide any revenue information; however, he has happy to announce that the automated online-advertising system was more profitable than last year.

It’s known that all the social-media websites’ prime goal is to share, but in the social-media industry is all about winning to be number one in the market and not to share.

There is major competition in a region of online business dominated with powerful companies. Facebook, MySpace and now Twitter are all competing for the attention of the same users. Recently, however, MySpace has seen some setbacks with traffic which is being blamed on their heavy use of advertising.

Facebook’s relative lack of intrusive ads have helped it to gain more footing against its arch rival, according to analysts.

It is okay to have online ads on websites, they say, but subscribers from MySpace have been turned off by the intrusive and smothering manner in which the site has inundated them.

Mr. Owen Van Natta, CEO of MySpace said in a memo to staff: “Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company.”

This past March, Van Natta commented on a report that he knew Facebook’s “clean design with little advertising clutter” influenced its rapid growth. MySpace is in the process now of cutting back on its advertising.

Microsoft is suing three people from Vancouver whom have committed click fraud by improperly manipulating Microsoft’s online advertising.

The three defendants are a family consisting of two brothers and a mother. The brothers Eric and Gordon Lam and the mother Melanie Suen made more than $250,000 in profits. However, Gordon Lam denies the existence of any lawsuit with Microsoft.

Representatives from Microsoft commented that since last year they’ve being monitoring the waves of fraudulent clicks on advertisements. They found out about the Lam brothers and his mother after a long search that lead them back to the family as the main source of the fraud, allegedly.

As ironic as it could sound, New Zealand has reported a significant increase in online ads compared to 2008.

The New Zealand Interactive Advertising Bureau has recently reported that during this first quarter of 2009, the country has had a strong growth in comparison to the first quarter of 2008.

Last year’s traditional advertising media was down 10%, however, the auditor company PriceWaterhouse Coopers has revealed the information that the first three months of 2009 online ad spending increased 7.99%. In the quarter there was a total revenue of $46.26 million above the numbers of the same period in 2008.

“The IAB’s trailing 12-month total for NZ’s online ad spend has now hit an all-time high of $196.55 million.”

Apparently, New Zealand’s market is hot and one worth looking into.

In a time where everybody uses internet to buy, sell and even meet people, the online ads are being used by major companies to promote their business, but online ads are also used by politicians.

The U.S. Senator Harry Reid is using online ads for his 2010 re-election campaign. The ads were placed on Google at the beginning of June. When a user from Nevada is searching the web, the Reid’s ads appear as a series of sponsored links.

The interested side of Reid’s ads is that users are re-directed to a new website where they can read an article or interview about Senator Reid. Users don’t know that they’ve been sent there because of a online paid ad.