The Advertising Age reported that Microsoft’s big online ad campaign will change its name from Kumo to the new brand name Bing.  The launch will be carried out through a  $80 to $100 million online, TV, print and radio advertising campaign.

Microsoft is investing more than double of what Google invested in 2008. To have an idea of the dimension of the investment, Google’s entire budget for last year’s advertising campaign was around $25 million. Undoubtedly, Microsoft’s huge investment is hoping to put a chink in Google’s web dominating armor.

The slogan that Microsoft has picked is “today’s search engines” and Bing’s features are a huge jump forward over Google and Yahoo tools. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will show how to use Bing during the D: All Things D Conference starting on May 26th, 2009. But nothing is written in stones until users experience Bing for themselves.

According to the National Venture Capital Association, venture investors have invested $5.1 billion in more than 800 web start-up companies since 2004.

In a time of recession, advertisers have not been investing in online ads - - most are reducing their spending as much as possible. With the most traditional source of income in less abundance, web start-ups are looking for another way to make money, such as selling real or virtual goods or asking customers to subscribe to sites.

Professionals from the eMarketer have reported that online ads definitely went down from 20% to 30% in growth rates; however, in 2008 it ended up growing 10.6% and they are expecting to see the online ads grow 4.5% overall in 2009.

The way market consultants see online ads growing is that even though advertisers are spending less on display, classified and email ads, they are still willing to invest in search and video ads. Search marketing is by no means on its way out, in other words, but innovation and originality will be required for businesses to stay competitive and find success.

The recent research study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that almost half of all the adults who use internet in the U.S. rely on classified sites.

The amount of people that has been using online classified ads has more than doubled since 2005. Years ago, only 22% of web browsers dabbled in online adverts. According to SCOR, in April Craiglist had a total of 46.5 million visitors, and 93% of Craiglist traffic comes from classified listing sites.

This leaves Craiglist in the top 5 most visited web sites followed by Ebay which only had 3.9 million visitors in April. Craiglist charges to post ads in certain cities, but now are considering whether they should charge ordinary users fees for classified ad placements in all locations.

Within the next coming months, Craiglist will take a definitive action in this situation.

The SNL Kagan firm has conducted a new research study about the online ad spending growth. According to this market research firm, they believe that online ad spending will probably grow 6.2% in 2009. A total of $24.6 billion.

The study reveals that search advertising will account for 45.3% of online ad dollars while display advertising will go down from 11% to 4.6% in 2009.

It was in 2008 when Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL had a total of 57% of the online ads. For this year, professionals from Kagan’s firm believe that Google will be the only search engine to increase revenue in 2009. However, Yahoo could follow Google in the list of online ad spending.

Undoubtedly, the recession has affected online ad spending, but the second quarter looks more promising than the first one and this situation could change depending on the larger economies direction.

Yahoo, one of the top search engines, has recently launched a new ads campaign to bolster its Smart Ads platform which will enable advertisers to extend the customized display ad product to mobile phones.

Yahoo’s Smart Ads was lunched two years ago using anonymous data which is assembled from user’s search patterns and other site activities to create personalized ads. These ads give the user different offers according to their preferences.

Mitch Spolan, Vice President of North American field sales at Yahoo commented that this new feature in ads technology will “allow us to focus on our core competence of developing and building the best user experience possible on Yahoo.”

According to Yahoo executives, they reported that last month there were 150 million users whom spent a total of 43 billion total minutes on the site. Yahoo’s new ads campaign will definitely create even more traffic.

Starbucks, one of the major coffeehouses in the U.S and worldwide, has recently lunched a new campaign focused on a new generation of young coffee drinkers.

The campaign consist on putting posters up in six major cities across the U.S. Once the posters have been placed, people are challenged to be the first person to take a picture of the poster and upload it on Twitter.

The marketing campaign started this month in newspapers and magazines has been described by the company as “the biggest marketing effort it has undertaken”.

Mr. Davenport, chief marketing officer at Starbucks commented that the new generation sees Starbucks differently, not like the old generation that: “All they know is Starbucks, the big company,” now, with the new ad, they’ll get a new sense of Starbucks.

The company NewCars.com, which is a subsidiary of Cars.com, has recently suffered from pay per click advertising fraud.

According to Cars.com, a company based out of Santa Monica, California, during the last year, most of its numbers of clicks on NewCars.com ads were coming from Bulgaria, Indonesia and the Czech Republic, but the strange situation here is that they don’t do business there.

The system of pay per click is simple: when a web surfer clicks on the advertiser’s link, the latter pays to a search engine every time there’s a click, and the site hosting the ad also makes a portion of that fee. Click fraud occurs when the site hosting the paid links clicks the link repeatedly to inflate its numbers and generate unwarranted income.

Isabel Sopoglian, Vice President of online marketing for Cars.com has commented to the New York Times:”Click fraud is a serious problem, and we’re aggressively trying to fight it.”

Click fraud made up 20% of NewCars.com’s overall ad spending on Yahoo in 2007. They refused to reveal how much they have spent on online advertising as a whole.

Mrs. Heather Hopkins, Senior Online Analyst for Hitwise U.S, has reported that paid search traffic has gone down 26% in comparison to 2008.

The analyst commented that comparing the pas four weeks up to May 9th, 2009, to the same four week period of 2008, this year’s search engine traffic to all websites that was coming from from paid clicks declined 26%.

Hopkins commented:”This trend is apparent across 16 of the 17 Hitwise parent categories (i.e. Automotive, Food and Beverage, Health and Medical, etc). The only category that didn’t see a decline in paid traffic was Education, which received 1.45% of search visits from paid clicks compared to 1.39% last year.”

Apparently, referrals from search engine keeps going up, but the proportion of clicks that go to sponsors websites or paid listings is descending. Undoubtedly, this is the result of the cutbacks during the recession.

The BIA has recently finished a study about TV and radio stations’ online investment and the study revealed that both TV and radio broadcasting are beginning to generate revenue from online ad placements.

According to the conducted research, TV and radio stations could earn $2 billion in 2013 from online ad sales. The BIA firm also commented that in 2008, TV and Radio stations sold a collective $805,000 million in online sales, which accounts for 7.3% of the total $11 billion spent on Internet ads last year.

It wasn’t until last year that the firm BIA collected data about TV and Radios stations’ online ad sales, so it’s hard to know if last year’s revenue grew in comparison to previous years. However, according to the current study revealed by BIA, they estimate that from the $805,000 million sales ad, $342,000 million come from the radio business while $463,000 million from the television industry.

TV and Radio stations are taking online advertising more serious than ever and they will keep investing, we’ll see how revenue is at the end of 2009.

Yahoo! has made their web analytics software free to those running ad campaigns and jazzed it up in the process.

In a Yahoo! Search Marketing blog post, editor Jeff Sweat said search advertisers can use the tool to track the performance of their ad campaigns.

Among the new features and functionality are demographics and interest group reports, segmentation, filters, demographics and interest group dashboards, scheduled reporting and custom fields to create your own actions.

“Yahoo! Web Analytics offers user insight that you are not likely to find in other free analytics tools,” said Sweat. “If you have a select group of people you want to roll this out to, you can add more functionality and advanced metrics because you can cut certain segments off.”

Google certianly has a real rival in the realm of web analytics after this launch.