Online Advertising

Medium, the once-promising platform led by Twitter cofounder Ev Williams, is losing 50 staffers -- about a third of its workforce -- and will undergo a radical overhaul to fix what the CEO has deemed a "broken" business model -- advertising-supported online publishing. Williams touted the company's ...

Facebook and Google have amended their internal policies regarding advertising on fake news posts in response to pressure from users and a growing controversy within the company. There are mounting concerns that the presidential election may have been influenced by unvetted fake news stories trendin...

Google last week filed a response in a 6-year-old antitrust battle with the EU, which has charged that its search ads unfairly promoted its own shopping service and blocked rivals. The response addresses a supplementary statement of objections the European Commission sent to Google this summer. The ...

Facebook on Wednesday reported a record Q3, beating analysts' expectations for the fourth straight quarter, but investors' concerns about the future drove down share prices. They closed Thursday at $119.95, down more than $7 from Wednesday's closing price of $127.17. Friday saw little movement, with...

Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer is facing extradition to California on charges his company earned millions of dollars by promoting adult and child prostitution through escort advertisements run on the site. Ferrer's arrest took place in Houston upon his return from the Netherlands to the headquarters of hi...

Pandora on Thursday launched Pandora Plus, a replacement for its $5-a-month Pandora One streaming music service. The 4 million Pandora One subscribers will be switched over to Plus, which will continue to offer ad-free listening at the same price. However, Pandora Plus also offers an opt-in video ad...

Adblock Plus, together with partner ComboTag, on Tuesday launched the beta version of the Acceptable Ads Platform. AA is an interactive platform that pre-whitelists ads publishers and bloggers then can place on their sites. It will only contain only ads that abide by AA's criteria for size and label...

Adblock Plus on Thursday announced that the open source community had created a filter to neutralize Facebook's latest offensive in its ongoing battle with ad blockers. Any Adblock Plus users who want to implement the workaround will have to update their filterlists manually. "For this round of the ...

Facebook last week announced a new move to fight clickbait in the News Feed: downranking links from Web domains and Facebook Pages that consistently post clickbait headlines. Those that stop posting clickbait no longer will be downranked. Users who post links that lead to a clickbait domain on their...