Online Advertising

Instagram on Thursday gave users a taste of what its upcoming sponsored photos and videos will look like. Instagram has assured users that the posts will feel natural and not compromise the network's aesthetics. The photos and videos will appear in the same format as an ordinary Instagram Post, with...

Mozilla has released a tool to show which companies are monitoring your online browsing activity in its mission to make the Web more transparent. Lightbeam, available as a free Firefox browser extension, shows which third-party companies are tracking your browsing activity, and how they are connecte...

Facebook has introduced Stories to Share, a tool to help media outlets -- from online publications to TV broadcasters to music startups -- maximize value. Appearing in the media panel of a publisher's Facebook page, Stories to Share makes recommendations based on the number of shares a post has rece...

Yahoo on Monday announced the hire of New York Times tech columnist David Pogue to lead "a major expansion of consumer tech coverage." He will publish columns, blog posts, video stories and more, starting later this year, the company said. Pogue and his team "have much bigger plans, too, for all kin...

Investors sent Google's shares soaring past the $1,000 mark Friday following its stellar third-quarter earnings report. Google reported $14.89 billion in revenue, a 12 percent increase compared with the same time a year ago, beating Wall Street expectations. It posted net income of $2.97 billion, up...

Google is planning to compensate users for letting it monitor their behavior via a mobile app currently in development. The project is part of Google's Screenwise market research program, which was launched about a year ago, said Google spokesperson Andrea Faville. "We conduct this research with sma...

British retailer WH Smith has shuttered its UK site and will keep it offline until all particularly objectionable sexual content is removed from its offerings. Last week, technology news site The Kernel reported that WH Smith -- along with Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other retailers -- was sellin...

Google has announced changes to its Terms of Service that will take effect Nov. 13. In short, users' profile names and photos will be served up together with content such as reviews they share, ads they +1, comments they post, or who and what they follow. Only people users choose to share content w...

Nielsen on Monday rolled out Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings, a service it says is the first-ever measure of the total activity and reach of TV-related conversation on Twitter. Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings measure not only "authors" -- or the number of people tweeting about TV programs -- but also the mu...

Over the next couple of months Instagram will begin incorporating the "occasional ad" in U.S. users' feeds, the company announced on Thursday. The ads will include high-quality photos and videos from a few brands that are part of the Instagram community, the company explained. Users will have contro...