According to Millennial Media, ad requests on its network from the Fire increased 261 percent on December 25th and another 46 percent on the 26th.

And for Christmas week entire?

Average daily growth of 113 percent.

Which is impressive. And to be clear, this is not a throwaway metric. Millennial Media’s mobile ad network is among the largest in the United States, second only to Google’s, so this spike is very real. That said, it will be interesting to see how much staying power the Fire has now that the holidays have ended and we’re headed into 2012, which will see the debut of Apple’s next iPad.

The e-commerce giant has started what is effectively an ad network* where it buys Web advertising inventory and resells it to marketers at a premium. It can add a mark-up to its ads because it’s using the data it collects about its visitors and shoppers to target likely prospects.

Amazon has noodled with Web ads in the past, but has confined itself to selling space on Amazon.com and other sites it owns, like IMDB.com. This is the first time it has branched out into ads on third-party sites, and that could be a big deal: It could be a serious revenue stream for the company, and it could also raise a privacy fuss.

The company is moving into the third-party ad business with the help of Triggit, a San Francisco-based ad tech company; there’s a press release announcing the partnership at the end of this post. An Amazon rep declined to comment beyond the announcement.

Here’s how it works: Amazon uses the detailed data it collects on its customers and visitors to create pools of potential marketing targets. Amazon tells Triggit to hunt down particular Web surfers after they’ve left the site, using tracking “cookies;” once the start-up finds them it purchases ad inventory those users are looking at. Amazon uses that ad space to serve up an ad for the marketer it’s working with, and charges them for the impression.

This is another take on “retargeting,” where advertisers trail Web surfers from site to site, and which has become standard issue for Web advertising. Retargeting rankles some privacy advocates, since Web surfers usually aren’t aware that people are tracing their movements.

The targeting is theoretically anonymous, since the marketers aren’t technically tracking individual people but their Web browsers. But that distinction doesn’t mean much to many people.

And since Amazon’s working with much more information — it knows what you looked at on its site, what you bought, and all sorts of other personal information — I can see folks making a fuss about this move, too.

On the other hand, Amazon’s already using personal information to show you stuff you might like to buy on its own site, and via promotional e-mails (“customers who have purchased or rated music by Elvis Costello might like to know that Delivery Man is now available”). So it’s entirely possible most people will shrug this off, if they’re even aware of it.

And if it works, there’s a lot of opportunity for Jeff Bezos and company here. Not only does Amazon have an enormous data set to work with, it can pitch marketers on its ability to “close the loop” between online advertising and commerce — it can get an ad in front of a potential customer, and then show that the customer ended up buying the product on Amazon.

Amazon chooses Triggit’s Demand Side Platform (DSP) technology

San Francisco, Calif. – June 28, 2011 – Triggit today announced that it has been selected by Amazon.com to serve as a Demand Side Platform (DSP) for Amazon’s digital display advertising. Triggit will provide Amazon with its sophisticated real time bidding (RTB) software to enable Amazon to show the right ads to the right users across nine ad exchanges and more than four million websites.

“To be selected to provide technology to a company as technically advanced as Amazon is humbling and incredibly exciting,” said Zachery Coelius, Triggit’s CEO. “We are looking forward to working with the Amazon team to hopefully bring some of the amazing innovation they have brought to ecommerce to the world of advertising”.

Triggit has been at the forefront of recent innovation in the online advertising marketplace and has developed technology that enables companies such as Amazon to better communicate with their audiences with highly relevant and timely messages across the entire web. Over the past year Triggit has seen wide adoption of its technology across the Fortune 500 and now counts as customers a diverse group of companies such as Kodak, Mazda and Orbitz. That market traction also enabled Triggit’s revenues to grow by over 2000% in 2010.

*For AdExchanger readers: Yes, this isn’t technically an ad network. But for general readership, the phrase should work well enough.

Then there are the folks trying to make sure you can’t look away from their ads.

We can put Undertone’s new “PageSkin” ads in the latter category. I don’t love the name, but the idea is simple enough: The ad network’s newest unit fills up the empty vertical borders on the sides of  many, but not all, Web pages.

Like so:

Straightforward, right? You don’t have to like it, but that doesn’t mean Web publishers won’t try it: Consider it the digital equivalent of sticking ads in front of movies, or on PBS, or any other place that didn’t use to have them but does all the time now. Undertone CEO Mike Cassidy says he will “easily” get “double-digit” CPMs for these.

The persistence of the ad unit does run a little counter to other in-your-face ads other Web publishers have been adopting in the last year or so. Like “pushdown” ads that temporarily, um, push down the content you want to see to make room for an ad.

Then again, I’ve already adapted to those, or at least I think I have. I’m now conditioned to expect an ad-sponsored hiccup before I get to the stuff I want, so my brain takes a little pause as the page loads up.

Meanwhile, here’s an approach that I definitely like: Run an ad in a place where you expect to see ads–but run a different kind of ad.

I’ve questioned Google’s attempts to promote its online products with offline ads before, but I do applaud the company for attaching its Chrome Browser to Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign with a TV campaign.

Even more interesting is that while Google has run the spot during “Glee”, it’s also made a point of venturing farther afield: I’ve now seen it during a TNT NBA playoff game, and during daytime runs of ESPN. It shouldn’t be interesting that an explicitly pro-gay ad appeared on big-time sports broadcasts in 2011, but it is. And that’s sort of the point.

[Excerpt image via Lord Jim]

Here’s a scorecard:

An Ad Network: This is one that seems obvious to many industry watchers. Facebook has widgets and integrations around the Web, and could easily turn those into revenue-generating opportunities. It could use its social graph to introduce targeted advertising and provide real competition to Google and other ad networks.

But the company has denied repeatedly that it is working on an ad network. Dan Rose, the company’s VP of partnerships and platform marketing, said this week at DLD in Munich, “We get that question a lot, and the answer is always the same: there are no plans for that at this point.”

However, this week Facebook launched a reprise of its failed Beacon product that turns off-site behavior–user “likes”–into “sponsored stories” within its site.

Prognosis: Likely later this year. This would be a good revenue stream to turn on before Facebook goes public, as it says it’s likely to do in 2012.

A Facebook Phone: This one is a rumor mill regular, and it came up again Wednesday with a report that Facebook would launch two phones with HTC at Mobile World Congress this year.

Rose responded at another event in Europe, “This is really just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs and integrated them into their device in an interesting way….The rumors around there being something more to this HTC device are overblown.” (via Reuters)

But baking Facebook into a phone makes sense. As Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said on Tuesday, “Mobile devices are inherently social.”

Taylor said Facebook wants to take a platform approach to mobile, maximizing accessibility through use of HTML5. But it could be hard to resist demonstrating deep address book integration, instant personalization and other benefits of a Facebook-designed mobile phone.

Prognosis: The denials seem to be a matter of semantics. Facebook is likely to support these projects, and they are coming to market soon.

Payments for Non-virtual Goods: Another major move for Facebook this week was to announce that usage of its Facebook Credits virtual currency would be mandatory starting this summer. It’s a big deal that Facebook will be hooking up credit cards and PayPal accounts for many of the 200 million-plus users who play games every month on its platform.

The obvious next step for Credits is payments for non-virtual goods. But that may not be a viable model given Facebook takes a 30 percent cut of all Credits, which would destroy margins on just about everything but virtual goods. Asked this week at the Inside Social Apps conference whether Facebook would expand Credits to apply to other types of purchases, Deb Liu, the company’s commerce product marketing manager, said no.

“Facebook credits is built as a virtual currency and it’s really built for virtual goods,” she said. Facebook sees Credits as “an opportunity to drive better experience particularly in the games world.”

Still, that doesn’t mean Facebook couldn’t use a similar system to introduce ways for users to pay for digital goods like media within its platform. Margins for digital goods could feasibly swallow a 30 percent cut, as they already do in Apple’s iTunes store.

Prognosis: Facebook’s launch of Credits has been halting and unpopular, in large part because it’s awkward to layer a 30 percent tithing onto its platform after developers have built their businesses. It seems likely to continue to move slowly on payments.

Voice and Video Chat: The Daily What ran a screenshot on Wednesday of a Facebook voice call option appearing on the screen of a user participating in text chat. A company spokesperson didn’t dismiss it as a PhotoShop job, but said, rather, “We don’t comment on rumor and speculation and have nothing to announce at this time,” in response to an emailed inquiry.

As Facebook moves to unify its users’ communications through its Facebook Messages product, adding voice and/or video calls makes sense. And on that front, a Facebook-Skype partnership to fend off Google’s voice products has been in the works for some time.

Prognosis: Soon, given it appears to already be out for user testing.

Autonomous Cars: Not gonna happen.

Why might Facebook start being more audacious and challenging powerful incumbents now? Well, for one thing, there’s no point in trying to stay under the radar anymore.

Throughout its history, Facebook has been somewhat slow-moving and remarkably undiversified, iterating internally on things, such as its “like” button, for years before releasing them to the world, and ramping up revenue at an excruciating pace compared with market expectations.

But the company has done one thing extremely well: User growth. Now that it’s topping out on its potential growth in many markets, Facebook may have to make bolder moves on the product side to increase metrics like engagement. And now that it’s getting ready to face the public markets, it may finally need to prove it can open up the revenue faucets.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Maybe, one day! So here’s another firm that wants a piece: InMobi, which has raised an $8 million B round from Kleiner Perkins and Sherpalo Ventures. Those same firms funded the company’s earlier rounds, and the Bangalore-based ad network has now raised $15.1 million.

InMobi’s pitch is that it isn’t Google (GOOG) or Apple (AAPL), but that its ads will still work on both of those companies’ mobile platforms. Of course, plenty of other ad networks make the same pitch, more or less.

InMobi launched in the U.S. only this year, but it has already generated two billion ad impressions, says Anne Frisbie, who runs the company’s American outpost. Apple is the company’s primary revenue driver in the U.S., Frisbie says.

Got that?

I didn’t either, the first few times I read a press release from Warner announcing a new “industry-leading partnership” between the music label and MTV Networks. But in short, Warner is bringing in MTV to sell its digital inventory, replacing an earlier relationship with Outrigger, a boutique sales shop. And while the release has zero mention of Google (GOOG) or YouTube, MTV’s chief job will be to sell ads against Warner’s clips on the giant video site, which accounts for the vast majority of Warner’s video views.

It’s not uncommon for MTV to sell its own stuff on other people’s sites–it has a “Tribes” ad network that does that on properties around the Web. But as far as I can tell, this is the first time that it has sold other people’s inventory, and the first time it has sold ads on YouTube.

Which makes sense, given Google and Viacom’s (VIA) three-year court battle. That fight is going to keep going, by the way, if Viacom makes good on its promise to appeal Google’s summary judgment victory last week.

So how’s that sales relationship going to work? I’ve asked Google and Viacom for comment.

Meanwhile, in the “digital music makes strange bedfellows” category, I’m told that MTV isn’t the only company that Warner approached about repping its stuff on YouTube. Other potential candidates included Hulu, AOL and Vevo.

That last one may raise some eyebrows, given that Warner is the only big music label that isn’t working with Vevo–which is supposed to be the “Hulu for music videos.”

But if MTV can sell ads on YouTube while fighting it in court, I guess anything can happen.

In the U.S., AdMob’s latest Mobile Metrics Report shows 10.7 million iPhones (or 18.3 million iPhone OS devices, e.g. the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad) on its mobile ad network during April, versus 8.7 million phones running Google’s (GOOG) Android OS.

Worldwide, AdMob shows 27.4 million iPhones (or 40.8 million iPhone OS devices) in its network, versus 11.6 million Android devices.

So while Android is making some impressive gains against Apple (AAPL), it is far outnumbered by the iPhone. For now, anyway.

That’s a pretty significant change for the company, which has previously allowed anyone to do just about anything with its data, without asking for a cent.

But that’s over, based on the new terms of service the company released today. The relevant excerpt:

In cases where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale, we require you to compensate us (recoupable against any fees payable to Twitter for data licensing).

That’s potentially a big deal. It’s also quite vague. And after talking to Twitter COO Dick Costolo this afternoon, I’m pretty sure that vagueness is intentional. Because I’m not sure Twitter knows exactly how it wants to proceed.

But I did extract some specifics from Costolo:

• Twitter is only focused on sites and services that sell ads against its stream. So if your service doesn’t generate revenue, or does so using something other than ads (i.e., subscriptions, analytics packages, etc.), you’re fine.
• If you do have to pay up, there are a couple of different ways to do it: You could cut Twitter in via a revenue split or agree to license its data stream, which has generally been free up until now. Or you could agree to use Twitter’s own “Promoted Tweets” ad service. Or some combination of the above.
• Costolo says the company hasn’t established a minimum fee, revenue split or another metric for payments. So a lot of this is going to get hammered out case by case.

Okay. But who, exactly, is going to have to pay up? Twitter’s terms aren’t clear, and while I went around and around with Costolo about this over the phone, I’m still not sure. Because I don’t think Twitter is sure.

Start with the easy stuff: If there’s nothing else in your service beyond tweets and you’re selling ads against those tweets, you could be paying.

“When we’re talking about cases where Twitter is clearly a key component of how a page is monetized, we need to have a commercial relationship,” Costolo said.

That sure sounds like TweetUp, the new “AdSense for Tweets” product that launched today, despite what CEO Bill Gross told me this morning. And it doesn’t sound like Muck Rack, a Twitter aggregation site owned by Sawhorse Media–because there aren’t any ads on Muck Rack. But if owner Greg Galant decided to start running Google (GOOG) AdSense ads on his pages, he might end up paying.

Except that Twitter says it’s not looking to find all the developers and publishers out there selling ads against the Twitter stream and tax them. Size matters, for one thing.

“We’re not trying to prevent people from building businesses,” says Tony Wang, a Twitter business development executive who joined my call with Costolo today. “We’re saying if there’s this thing you’re doing, and you’re selling ads against it, and it’s really big, we want to participate in that.”

So is Twitter only interested in really big publishers who use Twitter? Not necessarily. I asked Costolo about the Huffington Post, which has prominently embraced Twitter and uses it frequently to fill out its pages. Like this Twitter widget under a grisly story about a gored bullfighter (careful!).

That’s probably fine, Costolo said. But what about Huffpo’s “Twitter editions,” which are primarily made up of tweets? I’ve asked Costolo about those in a follow-up email, but haven’t heard back yet. My gut: He’s not sure yet. Which is going to make for lots of interesting conversations in the coming weeks and months.

UPDATE: Here’s Costolo’s response, via e-mail, on the Huffpo question. Not surprisingly, he heaps praise on a big Web site that helps Twitter increase its distribution. Though note he does mention plans to “monetize…together”:

HuffPo’s Twitter Edition pages are an awesome example of why those guys are one of our most innovative partners. We actively support and encourage those efforts, and look forward to working with them to monetize these opportunities together. In fact, I think they will play an important role in helping define smart approaches to advertising around Twitter-driven content.

It’s reasonable enough for Twitter to start trying to make money via companies that are making money via Twitter–it’s a move many outsiders have been calling for the company to make for some time. But it wouldn’t be Twitter if this was a straightforward process. Get ready for a bumpy ride.

UPDATE 2: After a day of discussion, Twitter has tweaked its language in its terms of service, swapping out  “In cases where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale” with “In cases where Twitter content is the primary basis of the advertising sale”.

What does that mean? Here’s Costolo, via email: “The policy remains the same — if Twitter content is the primary basis of the advertising sale, we require a commercial relationship. It’s important to note that just because there is Twitter content on a site, for example a Twitter widget, that does not mean we will require a commercial relationship. We encourage folks to find innovative ways to display Twitter content, and we aren’t interested in tracking down each and every implementation in order to be compensated.”

Here’s

That’s the job DoubleVerify wants. And the start-up just raised more money to help it get the gig. Institutional Venture Partners led a $10 million B round for the company, with earlier investors Blumberg Capital, First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures all reupping after a $3.5 million A round last May.

DoubleVerify’s basic pitch is directed at advertisers: It promises to make sure they are getting the media buys they paid for. The company says it can confirm, for instance, that a marketer that only wants to reach a U.S. audience on Yahoo (YHOO) doesn’t have its ads displayed to visitors in France–or that an ad network isn’t running invisible ads no one can see. It also promises to maintain “brand safety” for advertisers–to keep, say, a Jet Blue ad from running next to a story about the underwear bomber.

This stuff sounds small-time, but it’s a big enough concern for advertisers–and publishers that want to court them–to turn into a real business for DoubleVerify and a host of competitors.

DoubleVerify won’t disclose revenue, but says that since November, it has been generating enough to cover costs for a 45-person staff. My back-of-the-envelope math translates that into something like a $5 million run rate. (CEO Oren Netzer says I’m way low. Think “several multiples” of that, he says.)

The problem for DoubleVerify is the same one facing all start-ups that want to carve off a piece of the online ad market: There are a lot of start-ups that want to carve off a piece of the online ad market.

In DoubleVerify’s case, it is either getting paid directly by advertisers, in which case its fee gets tacked on to the ad buyer’s media spend, or by an advertising network, in which case its fee comes out of the ad buyer’s media spend. Either way, it is taking another slice of a piece that is already getting sliced quite thin.

Google announced plans to buy DoubleClick for $3 billion three years ago and finally closed on the deal a year later. Now the search giant has finally overhauled the display advertising company to its liking. Get ready for big stuff.

That’s the translation behind Google’s announcement this morning that it has upgraded its ad-serving platforms for publishers, by combining two related businesses: Its home-grown Google Ad Manager and Doubleclick’s Dart system.

Google’s statement (full text below) doesn’t have a lot of details, and those that are there won’t mean much if you’re not in the ad tech world.

If you are, the news that Google has fully integrated DoubleClick with its infrastructure will be meaningful because you can expect innovations and features to start rolling out in future weeks and months. Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of product management, says his team has already invested “thousands and thousands of engineering hours” in the upgrade.

In the near term, Google’s announcement also has a direct impact on start-ups like Rubicon and PubMatic, whose core business is built on helping publishers sell their inventory to multiple ad networks.

Google (GOOG) has more or less ignored that business for some time, but now the company is boasting that it can handle those duties in addition to a suite of other services. Translation: That’s a cute business you guys have built over there. We’ll be taking it now.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence, then, that Rubicon made an oblique announcement last week that was more or less an attack on Google.

Here’s the full text of Google’s announcement:

Google releases its next-generation ad serving platform for publishers

Key points

• Google announces upgraded ad serving platform, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP)
• Part of a full suite of products to help publishers maximize online advertising revenues
• New DoubleClick logo unveiled

Today, as part of its efforts to help online publishers maximize advertising revenues from their website content, Google announced its upgraded ad serving platform for publishers–DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

DFP is a single platform that upgrades and will replace Google’s existing ad serving products: DoubleClick’s DART for Publishers and Google Ad Manager. The upgraded DFP combines Google’s technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick’s display advertising and ad serving experience.

For larger online publishers, managing, delivering and measuring the performance of ads can be a hugely complicated process. Major online publishers (including social networks, entertainment sites, portals and news sites) use ad serving to manage the complex process of how and when the ads they have sold appear on their websites.

Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management at Google, said:

“Google wants to help online publishers make the most money possible from their content. The upgraded DFP is part of our suite of products that are designed to help online publishers maximize their advertising revenues. Ad serving is the machinery that powers the online advertising world, so improving that technology can put a lot of money in publishers’ pockets. This upgraded platform is another major milestone in our continuing investment in the display advertising ecosystem.”

The upgraded DFP is part of Google’s suite of products–also including AdSense and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange–to help online publishers maximize their advertising revenues across all their ad space, whatever their size and however they choose to sell their ad space.

It includes a wide variety of key features that will help enable publishers to get the most value out of their online content:

• A new interface that has been completely redesigned to save time and reduce errors.
• Far more detailed reporting and forecasting data to help publishers understand  where their revenue is coming from and what ads are most valuable.
• Sophisticated algorithms that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
• A new, open, public API which enables publishers to build and integrate their own apps with DFP, or integrate apps created for DFP by a growing third-party developer community (apps under development today include sales, order management and workflow tools).
• Integration with the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange’s “dynamic allocation” feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their ad space to bids from multiple ad networks. Dynamic allocation is described in this document [pdf].

DFP comes in two flavors, tailored for different publishers’ needs:

• DFP–for larger online publishers, to which current DART for Publishers customers will be upgraded over the next year.
• DFP Small Business–a simple, free version designed for growing online publishers, to which we will be migrating Google Ad Manager customers.

To reflect Google’s continued investment in DoubleClick’s products and the central role of DoubleClick’s technology products within Google’s display advertising business, Google is also today unveiling some changes to the DoubleClick logos–including typset changes, incorporating a new “by Google” theme, and retiring the “DART” brand.

Google’s logic here is straightforward: If other big companies are buying mobile ad networks, then Washington can’t possibly be upset with us for buying AdMob.

And note that Google (GOOG) is also cheering on other mobile ad network mergers and acquisitions that have yet to happen but that the industry now expects, especially from rival Microsoft (MSFT). From Google’s Public Policy Blog:

Today’s news that Apple is acquiring one of AdMob’s competitors, Quattro Wireless, is further proof that the mobile advertising space continues to be competitive. And with more investments and acquisitions in the space, including from established players like Apple and Google, that’s a sign that vigorous growth and competition will continue. That’s ultimately great for users, advertisers and publishers alike.

Of course, there’s only one player here with a dominant lead in Web advertising, so only one of them is going to get significant regulatory scrutiny, no matter how many more deals we see.

Anyway, if Google is looking for other arguments to appease the Feds, how about this one: You can’t monopolize a market that doesn’t exist yet. And while everyone’s sure that mobile advertising will be a big deal one day, it won’t be for a while.

Meanwhile, check out this great “slow clap” montage!

But here’s one very important priority: Reversing the direction of this chart. Via JP Morgan’s Imran Khan, it tracks the amount of money the company has been able to generate from every 1,000 page views:

As Khan notes, you can pin a lot of AOL’s (AOL) ad slump on the previous regime’s decision to sell much of the company’s inventory through its “Platform A” ad network, which stressed volume over price. That is, the AOL sales team was rewarded for selling as much as it could, no matter how much money it got for the stuff.

Armstrong’s solution sounds simple, and it’s one that other big Web players, like CBS (CBS) and Yahoo (YHOO) are trying to do as well: Sell less stuff, at higher prices. It won’t be that easy, of course.

Armstrong’s task may be even harder than that of his peers because AOL’s salesforce, once one of the top shops on the Web, has been in free fall for several years. It’s not a coincidence that Armstrong is a career sales guy, but the sotto voce criticism of his tenure at Google (GOOG) is that he never really needed to sell anything because Google’s ad product sells itself.

That’s a gross simplification, without question. But the best way for Armstrong to prove his critics wrong is to turn that chart around.

That’s the unsettling story that comes out of the Times’s explanation of the incident, in which an untold number of the sites’ visitors were served up with an ad promoting malware.

The attack, which the Times says was also directed at other, unnamed news organizations, is worrisome enough. But the fact that the culprits behind it essentially walked right into the front door of the New York Times (NYT) and conned the paper into distributing the fraudulent ads is really scary.

The short version: The Times says that someone who “masqueraded as a national advertiser” bought ad space on the site, which is visited by some 45 million people a month from the U.S. alone. The unnamed buyer “provided seemingly legitimate product advertising for a week.”

UPDATE: The Times says the fake ads were for Internet phone service Vonage.

Then, over the weekend, the culprits started churning out the malware. The Times has issued a statement explaining some of what happened, which I’m reprinting at the bottom of this post (the paper also has a consumer guide to help you protect yourself from malware, viruses and other Web unpleasantness).

But the statement is a bit confusing and seems to indicate that the paper was compromised by an ad network it used to sell remnant space on the site. That’s what I thought might have happened at first, and that’s what the paper’s tech staff thought as well–note the reference to “suspending all third-party advertisements on the site.”

But I double-checked with Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty, who confirmed that that paper’s own staff had sold the fake ad.

How could this happen? I don’t know–anyone with Web buying experience want to weigh in? But I do know that it’s not the first time bogus ad buyers have bought space directly from publishers.

Earlier this year, I wrote about an incident in which someone pretended to buy ads on behalf of Hyundai. And that story elicited a response from an ad exec at a very big, very well-known Web publisher, who told me that in 2008, his employer had received a large order on behalf of a different auto company, and ran some of the ads before figuring out they were fakes.

Here’s the Times’s explanation:

As you know, over the weekend, nytimes.com was the victim of a malware attack that targeted several news organizations. The culprit masqueraded as a national advertiser and provided seemingly legitimate product advertising for a week. Over the weekend, the ad being served up was switched so that an intrusive message, claiming to be a virus warning from the reader’s computer, appeared.

As soon as we were made aware of the situation, we took aggressive steps, suspending all third-party advertisements on the site. We posted information about the attack on our home page and directed readers on what to do if they encountered the malicious code. There is additional information posted today on our homepage and our Gadgetwise personal technology blog.

We now know how it occurred and have taken steps to prevent a similar situation from happening.

Now Razorfish is formally on the block: The Financial Times reports that Microsoft (MSFT) has hired Morgan Stanley to hawk the agency and suggests that French ad conglomerate Publicis Groupe could be a buyer. Then again, so could every other big ad holding company, including Omnicom (OMC) and WPP (WPPGY).

The FT throws out a value of $600-$700 million for Razorfish, down from the $800 million price tag that AdAge put on the shop last summer, which was the last time sales chatter heated up. At the time, the buyer was supposed to be WPP. Microsoft paid $6 billion for all of aQuantive in 2007.

Why has everyone been so convinced that Microsoft would sell something it bought in 2007? Because everyone thought that Microsoft never wanted Razorfish–it wanted the rest of aQuantive’s ad network business. And presumably what it really wanted was Doubleclick’s ad network business, but Google (GOOG) beat it out on that deal. Yahoo (YHOO) had already bought RightMedia and WPP bought 24/7 Real Media. (Boy, a lot of money was spent on ad networks back then! And not coincidentally, a flood of ad network start-ups flooded the market shortly after those transactions went through.)

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own people have never tried particularly hard to argue that the company was committed to owning an ad agency. Though they did try to argue that owning one wasn’t a conflict with the online publishing business it keeps burning money on. Now that won’t be a problem.

[Image credit: g-hat]

Among the interesting findings:

• People use free apps an average of 20 times before getting bored and looking for something else.
• The average time they spend using/playing with the apps is 9.6 minutes.
• So-called “tailgate” ads, which are short flash videos or games users interact with before an app launches, are keeping people’s attention for about 22 seconds–a positive development in the fledgling mobile ad space.

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Digital Daily was on hand at Macworld ’09 Monday. Despite the flurry of wonky reporting about the health and/or “imminent death” of Steve Jobs–put into perspective here by BoomTown–nothing too remarkable happened during Apple’s (AAPL) final appearance at the annual event. Phil Schiller did a solid job delivering the keynote in Jobs’s place, introducing a new 17-inch MacBook Pro with an eight-hour internal battery and some innovative updates to iWork and iLife. Schiller ended his keynote with the announcement of changes in pricing and digital rights management for iTunes, punctuated by the surprise appearance of crooner Tony Bennett. Apparently, as Bennett sang, the best is yet to come. Crack photojournalist Adam Tow was on hand to capture the keynote in its entirety–All Things Digital’s photo coverage can be found here.

MediaMemo reported from CES about the pervasive 3-D theme of the conference and wondered whether people would pay cash to see a football game in 3-D at a theater instead of just staying home. There was the ongoing litany of the casualties of the econalypse: “Semantic” ad network Peer39 shut down its ad operation this week, Hearst is about to pull the plug on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Forbes announced layoffs and Sir Howard Stringer announced the elimination of thousands of jobs at Sony (SNE). MediaMemo also caught the much anticipated introduction of Palm’s (PALM) new smartphone, the Palm Pre, and its new Web OS, a combo Palm deems superior to the iPhone and that many others consider Palm’s last chance for survival. The product’s success or failure will have a lot to do with its pricing, about which there’s much disbelief.

BoomTown had the lowdown this week on an amusing rumor about a Microsoft-backed (MSFT) run at Yahoo (YHOO), the emergence of Carol Bartz as the top prospect for Yahoo CEO and Microsoft’s deal with Verizon (VZ) and Dell (DELL) to distribute search. Jerry Yang submitted to the all-seeing eye of BoomTown’s Flip camera along with Yahoo President Sue Decker to talk about Yahoo’s new product, Connected TV. The camera also caught some chatty attendees and a few demos, including one of a new Disney (DIS) music product given by a guy who looked like a member of ZZ Top.

Speaking of ZZ Top, catch gadget godfather Walt Mossberg trying out some 3-D glasses on his annual odyssey around the convention floor. All he needs is a longer beard and a ’32 Ford and he could be a band member, too. Walt and colleague Katie Boehret caught many of the more interesting gadgets on video, and Walt previewed some more for FOX News.

More next week.

If you’re not paying attention, it may seem as if the cratering economy hasn’t stopped the steady stream of start-up funding announcements.

Today, for instance, we learned that online music distributor TuneCore has raised $7 million, while CrispyGamer, a newish videogame site, has raised $8.25 million from J.P. Morgan’s Constellation Ventures.

But don’t be deceived: Almost all of the deals you’ve read about recently, as well as the ones you’ll see for the next few weeks, were closed earlier this fall.

If you want to get a sense of why these announcements will slow to a trickle going forward, scan down through VentureBeat’s discussion of CrispyGamer’s business.

Let’s leave aside the basics. The site wants to make a name for itself in the crowded world of videogame review sites by offering high quality reviews, but it’s not clear that CrispyGamer’s reviews are much different than its peers, and it’s not clear that readers are making the distinction either.

Instead, focus on the dollars, from the VentureBeat report:

Right now, the site isn’t commanding huge ad rates. It gets about a $2 CPM (cost per million, a measure of the amount of money that comes in for every 1,000 readers). Just a month ago, it looked like it would get $8 CPMs, but the economic downturn is taking a toll. CrispyGamer relies on a half-dozen ad networks to feed it the ads.”

Assume that the CripsyGamer folks, like most publishers, are inflating their advertising rates (and traffic, too) for public consumption. It’s still telling VentureBeat that its ads have been marked down 75 percent in the last month.

Yikes.

The upside, I suppose, is that CrispyGamer has advertising revenue, period. There are plenty of ad-supported start-ups that have yet to get around to actually selling ads, and it’s going to be awfully difficult to start doing so now.

And, if you want to be really generous, you could argue that videogames are going to get beaten up less badly than other sectors during the coming recession/depression/meltdown/whatever. In theory, dudes will keep buying videogames, while they hunker down in their basements, because it’s cheaper than most other entertainment options.

But CrispyGamer also says it has a staff of 20 people, including five full-time writers (what does everyone else do there?). That’s an awfully big staff to keep afloat on $2 CPMs–and it’s hard to imagine that CripsyGamers’s backers imagined that’s what they were getting into earlier this year.

[Image Credit: Itjournalist]