Wired has an analysis of what happened to Google’s share price when it became known that the growth in clicks per ad has stopped growing. Google’s stock closed down over 3% on news that the February click through rate grew only 3% in February compared with a year earlier and January didn’t rise at all on a year earlier. But Wired points out that the figures are the result of some changes in Google’s advertising policies.

The Mountain View-based company said in January that the drop in click-through rates is a result of its efforts to boost the usefulness of each click to its advertisers’ sales performance. For instance, the company decreased the space around a word that would result in a click, so more clicks would be intentional.

Some are arguing that Google’s advertising should rise even faster with the changes:

Rob Sanderson, an analyst with American Technology Research, said per-click revenue will rise immediately if advertisers see more value in each click, because they’ll pay more for them at auction.

Technorati Tags: advertising, Google, online

paidContent.org has made some changes to reflect its growing business, including appointing Charlie Koones, until recently publishing director of Variety, to its board. Read the details:

Charlie Koones is joining our board…till recently he was the president and publisher of Variety, and left in January, after spending 17 years within the Variety/Reed Business family. Koones was a primary architect of Variety’s digital growth. Since its launch nine years ago, Variety.com has enjoyed major gains in advertising and page views. I have known Charlie for a while now, and have admired his multi-platform approach and expertise in building an iconic brand such as Variety. He will help us build out our digital entertainment trade media business. He joins Nathan, Alan Patricof, Larry Kramer and myself on our Board. He is based in Los Angeles.

Technorati Tags: online

US newspapers have had their worst year for advertising for almost 60 years, reports Jeff Jarvis. Total print advertising plunged 9.4% to $42bn in 2007, the largest decline since records began. Internet advertising grew 18.8% to $3.2bn, but the rate of increase is slowing: it grew by 30% the previous two years. This looks like systemic on top of economic decline, he reckons.

Technorati Tags: advertising, newspapers

This one I would like to see….

Technorati Tags: mac, video