Here are a few of the top stories in which eMarketer data and analysis were featured this week:

7/21: New York Times – Microsoft Posts a 30% Increase in Profit, but Sales of Windows Are Weak
Sales of Microsoft’s core Windows computer operating system continued to erode for the second consecutive quarter as consumers shifted away from PCs to tablets. Read more.

7/21: Businessweek.com – Daily Deal Sites Mean Everyone Wins
Daily deal sites have exploded onto the scene, and the market and data show that these businesses have the backbone for long-term sustainability and growth. Read more.

7/21: Reuters – Twitter working on $800 mln funding deal
Microblogging service Twitter is working on an $800 million funding deal that values the company at $8 billion, the website All Things D reported. Read more.

7/21: Wall Street Journal – Millennials Make Millions
Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg soon may command a $100 billion company. But for three siblings from New Jersey, the sale of their social-networking company for $100 million in cash and stock is a reminder that life-changing payouts are possible for entrepreneurs below the lofty strata of Facebook, Groupon Inc. and other red-hot tech companies. Read more.

7/21: Wall Street Journal – Yahoo’s Unsurprising Surprise
Talk about having a credibility gap on display. Yahoo’s second-quarter results, released Tuesday night, were stunning in many respects, though perhaps not so much for investors inured to the company’s repeated disappointments. Read more.

7/20: Forbes.com – Can Behavioral Targeting Survive Privacy Worries?
Behavioral marketing, the practice of targeting people with advertising pitches based on their tracked online activities, has become a central way for advertisers to reach the audiences they want to reach across a splintered media landscape. Read more.

7/19: paidContent.org – In-Game Ad Provider SupersonicAds Raises $4.2 Million
Social gamer SupersonicAds has raised a $4.2 million first round as the company looks to continue it international expansion and the growth of in-game ads. Read more.

7/19: MediaPost.com – Magnetic Adds Site Retargeting To Search For Display Ads
Magnetic will launch Wednesday a site retargeting tool dubbed Magnetic Force. The offering gives site visitors text or image-based display ads, complementing the company’s search retargeting service. Read more.

7/19: Forbes.com – What Can Small Businesses Learn from Intel’s Social Media Strategy?
Last month at the World Chamber Congress in Mexico City, Ekaterina Walter, Intel’s Social Media Strategist, spoke to thousands of attendees on how small-to-medium businesses (SMB) can utilize social media for engaging and growing their customer bases. Read more.

7/19: Bloomberg.com – Yahoo Sales Miss Estimates as Rivals Siphon Display-Advertising Revenue
Yahoo! Inc., the most-visited U.S. Web portal, reported revenue that missed estimates as marketers favored competing sites and a sales-team shakeup made it harder to clinch advertising orders. Shares fell in late trading. Read more.

7/19: New York Times – Strong Sales Help Extend Apple Streak
Strong sales to shoppers in emerging markets and to business customers helped Apple extend its lengthy streak of stellar performance in its earnings report on Tuesday. Read more.

7/19: TechCrunch.com – Komli Media Acquires Mobile Advertising Platform ZestADZ
Komli Media, a major digital media network operator in the Asian-Pacific region, this morning announced that it has acquired ZestADZ, a mobile advertising platform, expanding the suite of solutions it can offers clients to encompass display, video, search, social media and now mobile. Read more.

7/18: TopTechNews.com – Google+ Social Net Is About Leadership in Selling Ads
Google’s new social-networking endeavor is more about helping the company do a better job of targeting ads to advertisers than creating an online hangout like Facebook. If it succeeds, Plus represents Google’s best shot yet at muscling into a market that has threatened to topple the Internet search and advertising leader. Read more.

For more of eMarketer’s recent news coverage, click here.

Consumers have been complaining more loudly than ever about privacy issues and the Federal Trade Commission has even proposed a do-not-track mechanism, which would halt marketers’ ability to follow consumers online. But ad spending on the most controversial form of targeting—behavioral targeting—is expected to rise by double digits in 2011. So how can marketers tread safely without turning off their audience? eMarketer principal analyst David Hallerman weighs in.

Question: A study done by PreferenceCentral found that the more people know about behavioral targeting, the less willing they are to receive free content in exchange for relevant ads. If this is accurate, should marketers rethink their spending on behavioral targeting?

David: What you have to wonder is, do people really view behavioral targeting as an invasion of privacy, or do they dislike it because they have no control over how marketers are using their personal data?

There will always be people who don’t want ads anywhere, but more people are beginning to understand that relevant ads can be useful. If advertisers are going to spend on behavioral targeting, they need to understand and accept that giving consumers more control over how they are targeted will help alleviate their fears.

Focusing on control as the crux of the whole privacy issue, as Spanfeller Media Group CEO Jim Spanfeller said, is “a way to make the privacy issue less about a religious conversation and more about a business conversation.”

Question: What kinds of “control” can marketers offer to consumers?

David: First, consider that one of the most trusted forms of marketing is opt-in email. The least trusted is spam. They’re both the same type of marketing, but the difference is that consumers give permission to receive the former. Applying this same line of thinking to display advertising can help to reduce concerns that behavioral targeting elicits.

Second, marketers and advertisers need to continue letting consumers in on how the process works. The leading example I’ve seen like this is the Power Eye button (which has been endorsed by AT&T, American Express, Microsoft, and other major advertisers) developed by the Better Advertising organization.

Power Eye provides an icon consumers can click on in the upper right-hand corner of an ad to get information on why that particular ad is being served to them. This type of transparency combined with some level of permission or opt-in will likely create a stronger sense of control and a more receptive audience.

Question: How would this affect ROI?

David: Establishing an initial trust between marketers and their audience through transparency can create the opportunity to find out more about the audience over time. That eventually makes for more robust data and therefore more accurate targeting—just as we’ve seen with email marketing, which has proven to be very effective.

Question: Will educating consumers and giving them more control be enough to satisfy consumers that the industry can regulate itself even when it comes to behavioral targeting?

David: Education together with greater consumer control over targeting and their data might be enough, but will the ad industry do enough? That’s the big question still out there. There are doubts about how much audience control the industry is willing to offer, and that’s why the government is looking to intervene.

Question: What else can the ad industry do?

David: Advertisers need to ask, “How does transparency take place?” I think we’ll see a lot of discussion around that this year because that has not been answered in a definitive way. I expect to see more examples like the Better Advertising button—which is just a first step in a longer process—especially in response to the government wanting to regulate.

What does Goldman Sachs’ $450 million investment in Facebook mean for marketers? Put bluntly, it’s a wake-up call. If companies are not already marketing on Facebook, they’d better start.

The obvious reason that Facebook is so attractive to investors like Goldman (and DST, which invested $50 million) is the social network’s growth. Facebook had 620 million unique visitors worldwide in October 2010, according to comScore. In spite of the much-ballyhooed value of one-to-one marketing, what marketers want is mass reach, and Facebook offers that in spades.

More important than reach is targeting. With Facebook, marketers also get micro-level targeting. With Facebook’s self-service tool, a marketer can reach a million people—or even 10 people. I’ve heard of cases where a marketer has designed such finely crafted ads that they reach just a handful of people at a particular company.

Facebook has a traditional sales team that visits the big ad agencies and sells the ads that appear on the right side of a user’s home page. But ads on other internal pages are from the self-serve system, and this is where Facebook is concentrating its attention for future ad-revenue growth.

This targeting tool is already responsible for about half of Facebook’s advertising revenues, which eMarketer last August estimated would be $1.3 billion in 2010. (Our next social network ad spending report—with an updated Facebook forecast—will be out soon.)

Facebook’s self-serve tool and intelligent database are perfect reasons for Goldman’s investment. No other company has the amount of information on consumers that is willingly provided by Facebook users.

Anytime you click the “Like” button, that information is added to Facebook’s database.

Like Coke? Facebook would be happy to target soft drink and junk food ads to you. Like the Seattle Seahawks? Here’s some team gear you might want to buy. And ads are also apparently being targeted to what people post. Last week I posted a set of pictures from my Christmas vacation to Kauai and today, Facebook showed me an ad for a vacation rental on the island.

While this incredibly smart targeting tool only exists within Facebook right now, Mark Zuckerberg and company are putting all the pieces in place to push this ad system across the internet and create the web-wide ad network that’s been talked about for years. And that’s where the big money will be. As David Pakman, partner at VC firm Venrock in New York, wrote in a recent Ad Age column, the two things that will fuel quick growth at Facebook are “payments and off-site targeting.”

Facebook has not admitted to building an ad network, but it is already spreading its functionality in as many places as it can across the web. With features like Facebook Login, for example, publishers can add a little bit of code and enable users to sign on to their websites using their Facebook credentials. If I am on CNN, I can comment on or like an article and notify my friends through my Facebook newsfeed. Or, I can purchase a pair of jeans and show my friends how cool they look.

Facebook has conducted limited tests of banner ads carrying a Facebook “like” button; while the company has told me this isn’t a precursor to an ad network, it’s easy to see how such functionality might be tweaked to make it more ad network-like.

The bottom line: Imagine that rich database available to any advertiser anywhere on the web. This may well be the year that friendly, ever-present Facebook logo will be consumers’ constant companion and social conduit wherever they go online. And wherever they go, marketers will follow.

During the course of last week we weighed in on several trends to watch in 2010. Here’s a quick and tidy round-up of those predictions.

• Seven Predictions for 2010 from eMarketer’s CEO, Geoff Ramsey: During 2010, as US ad budgets crack open just a little, look for an accelerated migration of ad dollars from traditional to digital media. Advertising on social networks will never attract a large share of marketers’ ad dollars, while the classic interruption/disruption model of advertising, whereby marketers insert unwanted, usually irrelevant ads as a price the consumer must pay to view desired content, will erode, if not fade away.



• Social Media: Marketers will demand better ways to manage and measure the impact of earned media—the additional unpaid exposure a brand gets when consumers share about the brand online. Search will get more social in several ways: by including real-time content in results (e.g., Twitter posts), adding information from social network friends to results, and using collective information from other Web users to hone search relevance. These trends will yield new ad formats that may incorporate friends’ viewpoints or interactions directly into the ad—and will raise new red flags among privacy advocates. (Read more…)

Does this New York Times story imply even slower growth for online display advertising which is already down from $4.8 billion in 2008 to $4.6 billion in 2009, according to eMarketer estimates?

About two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California-Berkeley. … The topic may be technical, but it has become a hot political issue. Privacy advocates are telling Congress and the Federal Trade Commission that tracking of online activities by Web sites and advertisers has gone too far, and the lawmakers seemto be listening. … Marketers are arguing that advertising supports free online content. Major advertising trade groups proposed in July some measures that they hoped would fend off regulation, like a clear notice to consumers when they were being tracked.

As Congress and the FTC weigh in on behavioral targeting, the implications for online display advertising are not great. Increasingly, marketers are turning to Facebook and other forms of social media,  behavioral targeting technologies and ad network tools to track consumers’ online behavior–their shopping, reading and browsing habits–to deliver the right kinds of messages to them with the appropriate frequency. These tools are par for the course as online advertising on the backend grows more sophisticated.

Will lawmakers place restrictions on what advertisers can and cannot do? Will they require advertisers or portals to issue disclosure statements? Whatever happens could have a significant impact on online ad growth.