Market Meltdown: Ad Dollars Hang in the Balance (ChannelSeven, April 24th)
As the market for dotcom and telco stocks have started to lose their shimmer, firms are becoming accountable for their marketing expenses. Jaffer Ali, CEO of PennMedia looks at how the dotcom downturn will affect the near future of web advertising.

Web Firms May Vastly Inflate Claims of 'Hits' (LA Times, April 17th)
With no one set standard for measuring and reporting web traffic, many publishers have been taking liberties with their statistics, going to far as to imply that server hits, and requests made by bots, such as those deployed by search engines to crawl the web, qualify as visits. This article notes the necessity for a central auditing/tracking firm, while also suggesting the necessity for a crack-down on the artificial inflation of a property's stats.

About.com Offers Sponsored Links (internet.com, April 10th)
Following in the heels of successful pay-for-placement search engine GoTo.com, online publisher and recent entrant into online ad sales representation, About.com has unveiled a new product that allows marketers to sponsor text links that will appear both at the bottom of their Guide Sites and within the Sprinks.com search engine.

Pepsi Takes the Plunge With an Online Ad Campaign (NY Times, April 3rd)
While most major consumer brands have barely dabbled in online advertising - mainly under the assumption that the medium is suited more to direct marketing than brand-building - a move by PepsiCo to launch a huge co-branding deal in association with portal Yahoo! is a promising development.