Consumers More Accepting of Ads in Online Video
Luke Lancaster

A new study shows that users are finding that advertising is an acceptable trade-off for free online video. Consumers appear willing to sit through more commercials when the sponsor messages are surrounded by long-form programming.

For Brands on Facebook, Engagement Drops with Poor Content
Scott Luther

The top 300 brand pages on Facebook are generating lower levels of engagement with their fans, largely because of poor content and posting schedules. Although many of these pages are generating new Likes, posting too frequently with frivolous messages has dropped engagement rates 22% over the last year for these pages.

StumbleUpon Delivers Half of All Social Media Traffic
Jill Krumsick

Surpassing Facebook in referring traffic, the founder and CEO of StumbleUpon tweeted last week, “StumbleUpon now drives over 50% of all social referral traffic to US websites!”

New Data on Display from Google
Sarah Voges

Google’s annual display ad benchmark data for 2010 shows that marketers’ use of rich media ad formats doubled last year. But user response and engagement rates for rich media ads continued to fall during 2010. The data also revealed that larger ad sizes generate greater user response.