YouTube, once hailed as the “advertising medium of the future,” is having trouble fulfilling its promises of profit. While one of the most popular and influential sites on the internet, it is failing to make money for its parent company, Google [GOOG].

With 82 million unique viewers a month, and a large, if slippery, demographic, YouTube should be a huge money maker. But Google, who aquired the video sharing web site in 2006 for $1.65 billion, is finding that what it wound up with might indeed be a giant money sink. Don Reisinger of CNET believes Google’s buyout of YouTube was a “major blunder” that has “failed miserably.” Example: YouTube sends 300 billion GBs of data each month; bandwidth for that has been estimated to cost a million dollars a day.

Continue Reading »

A U.S. Sentate committee is set to discuss privacy concerns relating to targeted ads with prominent Web site representatives from Facebook, Google [GOOG], and Microsoft [MSFT] on Wednesday.

The discussions are meant to detail the extent to which targeted ads approach the threshold of violating privacy laws, specifically a 1986 wiretapping law established by the federal government that says at least one party within a communication must agree to be recorded.

The reference to the law relates directly to online advertising company NebuAd, which is taking targeted advertising to the next level by working directly with Internet service providers to track user habits.

Continue Reading »