Here’s for an original name - SocialMedia Networks - which is a new ad network for - yes, social media sites. People spend a lot of time on social networks and they tend to be younger and quite Internet savvy. However, they are a fickle group who don’t like overt marketing messages.

SocialMedia Networks says they’re the first ad network to focus 100 percent on social media. They have over three billion ad impressions to more than 15 million unique visitors per month. These ad impressions are delivered within 5,000+ applications and they’re appearing on Facebook, Bebo and MySpace.

I asked SocialMedia’s CEO Seth Goldstein a few questions about advertising on social networks with social apps.

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More bad news news about the economy and the newspaper industry. This is a particularly disturbing headline, especially if you’re in the newspaper industry. Plus, it’s an industry I’m fond of. Yes, that’s right - newspapers have had the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA), shows that total print advertising revenue fell 9.4% in 2007 compared to 2006. It now stands at $42 billion. That’s the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising revenue in 1950. The worst drop before that was in 2001 when revenue dropped 9%.

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Not sure if this old news or not but interesting all the same if you haven’t read about it yet. The NYTimes reported last month that 3 UK Internet providers (BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virginmedia) are teaming up to offer an advertising alternative to that offered by the big 3 search engines.

The 3 companies have allowed ad company, Phorm, to access customers browsing records in order to serve relevant ads to any website publisher wishing to join the scheme. The proceeds would then be shared between Phorm, the 3 Internet providers and the website publisher.

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The IAB conference just occurred, and John Battelle of Federated Media made the following comments about Wenda Harris Millard’s comments during her IAB speech:

I respect John Battelle and what he does with Federated a great deal, and there will ALWAYS be a place for custom ad campaigns (conversational marketing as they call it at Federated) that need to be based on human relationships and built for specific sites and audiences, but taking an “anti-algorithm” or “anti-ad exchange” stance when it comes to advertising is not really necessary. The fact that Millard even has to call it out like a battle cry is amusing to me because I don’t believe the algorithms and ad exchanges of the world are killing the premium advertising business. Nor will they ever do so.

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