WebProWorld

It’s no secret that YouTube’s trying to catch up to Hulu in terms of offering premium content; the site’s administrators often make a big deal out of movie and TV show additions.  What is under wraps – or at least hasn’t been publicized in press releases and blog posts – is that YouTube might also be interested in charging for access.

Google has made a change to the way it treats its "first click free" option for publishers. The option was designed for legitimate publishers to get around Google’s cloaking policies, which discourage the showing of one web page to a crawler while the user sees something different.

Advertise.com and the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) have shared some interesting findings from a survey about online ad technology. The two organizations found that there is a lot of untapped opportunity for retargeting in online advertising.

France saw widespread growth in online video viewing during the past year, as audience size and video engagement both increased significantly, according to a new report from comScore.

The number of online video viewers in France increased 36 percent to 34.6 million, while the number videos viewed grew 141 percent to 5.4 billion. The average time spent viewing videos online nearly doubled to 11.7 hours per viewer in September.

The Tiger Woods car accident has had the web abuzz over the weekend. Like nearly anything else that creates such buzz, cyber-criminals will find a way to exploit it. This incident is no exception.

It’s that time of year when all of the search engines are releasing their lists of top searches. Dictionary.com may not get the traffic of a Google, or even an Ask, which is owned by the same company, but its list provides a different perspective to the picture of what people are searching for.

Although 2009’s still one month short of being over, Google followed Bing and Yahoo this morning by identifying the year’s major search trends.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, "Michael Jackson" was one of the most common terms, and interest in the 2008 Olympics waned.

All sorts of corporations and individuals have agreed that the mobile market is key in China; many more people can afford Internet-enabled phones than PCs.  Baidu may be onto something, then, as it intends to have an app loaded onto phones before they’re made available for sale.

When Google’s current director of product management arrived at his desk this morning, he did so for the last time, according to a new report.  Keval Desai is supposed to be leaving Google in order to start a position at Digg.

If a French court has its way, eBay will soon have to fork over $2.6 million.  The fine stems from a ban on the sale (or purchase) of LVMH goods, and actually ties to a case that ended in eBay being told to pay LVMH $61 million.