SKYPE TO BECOME AD-SUPPORTED

Skype has always had an issue with becoming and staying profitable. Because of that, it has been sold and bought many times over. Things have only gotten worse as companies like Google have entered the VoIP fray with products like Google Voice.

Skype has just announced that it will begin showing advertisements as part of the Skype for Windows home tab starting later this week, which will be the first time that advertising has been promoted within the app. Ads will start rolling out in the US, UK and Germany first, with other countries to follow, while some of the first advertisers will include Groupon, Nokia, Universal Pictures and Visa, who have opted to buy daily ad campaigns.

Skype’s approach to ubiquitous ads in the desktop app isn’t entirely noxious: there’ll be a “hide ad” button for users fed up with seeing ads on a daily basis. Skype is also making it easier for people to reach out to the buyers of an ad space with a “Click & Call” button that makes ordering a proffered deal just a click away. They will also add a new “share” button that will hook into social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

AT&T JUMPING INTO LOCATION BASED ADVERTISING

AT&T is betting big on location-based shopping alerts through a partnership with Placecast. AT&T is debuting a branded ShopAlerts service, which will deliver special offers and discounts to consumers via their mobile phones when they are near a participating store or brand (initial brands include HP, KMart, and JetBlue).

The program is currently available to AT&T customers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco who have opted-in to receive Shop Alerts, but AT&T plans to roll the program out nationally by summertime and increase the number of participating brands.

All of this is powered by Placecast’s ShopAlerts, which are location-triggered mobile text messages sent from brands to consumers. Consumers can opt-in to receiving text messages in a variety of ways—at the store, online, via text-message, mobile websites or on Facebook.

Once the technology has been activated, consumers will be alerted when they are near a location that they are interested in or when the brand is offering sales and specials. ShopAlerts’ technology uses “geo-fences,” which are virtual boundaries that can be targeted via location-based marketing. Retailers can customize alerts to fit their brand and strategy.

FACEBOOK USING YOUR LIKES AND CHECK-INS TO CREATE ADS

Facebook just figured out a new way to make money off of your status updates and likes, and it’s a doozy: they’re now using your likes and postings about products and services to display to friends in advertisement form.

Showing up quietly on Wednesday morning without any mention from Facebook, you can see the new ads at worked in the right-hand ad column. If you friends check in at business or like other websites or products, and if Facebook has an advertisement deal with that company, you’ll start seeing their status updates as a “Sponsored Story.”

“Currently, marketers don’t have the ability to know or plan word-of-mouth endorsements as part of their campaigns,” Facebook’s product marketing lead Jim Squires told the Wall Street Journal. “This gives a way for marketers to increase the visibility of stories about their organization… this is word-of-mouth marketing at scale.”

Sound familiar? It should: back in 2007, Facebook tried more or less the same thing with Facebook Beacon, which turned into a huge class-action privacy lawsuit last time around because of the way it allowed marketers to publish off-Facebook purchases directly to users’ walls.

The current system isn’t likely to spark any class-action lawsuits, but it’s still got some privacy concerns associated with it: although Facebook will respect your privacy settings when it comes to sharing your content with strangers, there’s no way to stop Facebook from turning your wall status updates into a billboard to annoy your friend list.

MOZILLA OFFERS DO-NOT-TRACK TOOL

According to CNet, Mozilla, acting on a U.S. Federal Trade Commission proposal, has offered a detailed mechanism by which Firefox and other Web browsers could prevent Web pages from tracking people's online behavior for advertising purposes.
With Mozilla's do-not-track technology, network data packets from the browser would signal to a Web site that a person doesn't wished to be tracked. Then comes the tricky part: getting Web site operators to cooperate.
Alex Fowler, Mozilla's global privacy and public policy leader, said that with the mechanism, the browser would alert a Web site during basic communications that use the Web's Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). He also acknowledged that getting Web sites to cooperate is a crucial difficulty in getting the system to work:

As the first of many steps, we are proposing a feature that allows users to set a browser preference that will broadcast their desire to opt-out of third party, advertising-based tracking by transmitting a Do Not Track HTTP header with every click or page view in Firefox. When the feature is enabled and users turn it on, Web sites will be told by Firefox that a user would like to opt-out of OBA [online behavioral advertising]. We believe the header-based approach has the potential to be better for the Web in the long run because it is a clearer and more universal opt-out mechanism than cookies or blacklists...
The advantages to the header technique are that it is less complex and simple to locate and use, it is more persistent than cookie-based solutions, and it doesn't rely on user's finding and loading lists of ad networks and advertisers to work...
The challenge with adding this to the header is that it requires both browsers and sites to implement it to be fully effective. Mozilla recognizes the chicken and egg problem and we are taking the step of proposing that this feature be considered for upcoming releases of Firefox.

Mozilla doesn't appear to be acting alone. Today, "Google is expected to announced a privacy tool called 'Keep My Opt-Outs' that enables users to permanently opt out of ad -targeting from dozens of companies," The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, citing an unnamed source.