Virgin Mobile uses your webcam to change YouTube ads every time you blink

In what can only be described as one of the more unusual approaches to online advertising, Virgin Mobile’s YouTube page is now using a technology they’ve dubbed BlinkWashed in which they use your webcam to track your eye movements. Each time you blink, the onscreen advertisement will change. Um, what?

Facebook testing auto-play for videos, precursor to video ads

Facebook is in the process of testing a new mobile feature for Android and iOS users that will automatically play videos embedded in a News Feed as you scroll through it. The clips will initially play silently and if you don’t want to watch it, just keep scrolling. Tapping the video will take it full screen and enable audio.

The feature is only being tested with a small number of users at first to help iron out any bugs. It’s worth noting that auto-play videos will be limited to those posted by individuals, musicians and bands – no YouTube embeds or the like are allowed. Brand pages are also being excluded for now, we’re told.

Early feedback on the new feature is mostly positive as videos are said to load quickly, even over a wireless signal. Clips played seamlessly while being moved around in the feed and once a video dips off the screen, it stops playing to avoid excessive data usage. Overall, the experience is said to be smooth and natural.

Facebook is clearly peddling this as an easier way to watch videos on the social network but the obvious takeaway is that it’s simply a precursor to video advertisements.

Back in July, it was reported that Facebook was planning to launch 15-second television-style ads that would sell for between $1 million to $2.5 million per day. That would translate into an additional (and likely significant) revenue stream for the social network with companies like YouTube paving the way.

Startup discovers 80% of Facebook ad clicks coming from bots

A small startup known as Limited Run has publically decided to withdraw their presence from Facebook over concerns about the social network’s advertising practices. According to Limited Run, only 20 percent of ad clicks actually come from real people; the remaining 80 percent are all bot-generated.

The company became suspicious while testing Facebook’s ad system for the launch of their new brand. During these tests, they noticed that the social network was charging them for clicks but they could only verify that 20 percent of those clicks were actually showing up on their site. They tried multiple analytics services which all showed the same results.

Limited Run even went so far as to develop their own analytics software. Data from this program showed that JavaScript was disabled on 80 percent of clicks originating from Facebook. According to a post on their Facebook page (which will soon be deleted), if a person clicking an ad doesn’t have JavaScript enabled, it’s very difficult to verify the click. In their years of experience, only 1-2 percent of users surf without JavaScript, not 80 percent.

To further back up these claims, they built a page logger to keep track of each click coming into their site from Facebook. This data indeed showed that 80 percent of the clicks they were paying for were from bots.

Limited Run co-founder Tom Mango told TechCrunch that his company reached out to Facebook but all they received were canned responses. He further noted that they spent nearly a month testing and confirming all of their data just to be sure but he doesn’t blame the social network for what happened.

Mango says it could just as easily be a competitor running a DOS attack to drive up their advertising rates but he wishes Facebook would at least acknowledge the situation or attempt to do something to stop it.

Google contributed 80 billion to US economy in 2011

Google’s VP of Americas Sales Margo Georgiadis has authored a post on the company’s official blogthat reinforces the idea that the Internet is where business is done and jobs are created. To back up this claim, Google provided $80 billion of economic activity directly to advertisers, website publishers and nonprofit organizations across the US last year.

The post highlights the fact that 97 percent of Americans use Internet search to find local goods and services both on computers and mobile devices. And while some believe that technology is driving people to shop online rather than locally, this isn’t always the case.

Boston Consulting Group shows that US citizens who researched products online in 2011 actually spent about $2,000 to buy those goods in-store rather than online. Google says that’s nearly $500 billion in revenue that was spent on local retail.

Georgiadis cites multiple examples of how Google and the Internet is helping several businesses expand. New England baking company King Authur Flour recently took to the web and has since become an internationally-renowned business. Bornstein Sons, a home maintenance and repair contracting business based in New Jersey, now receives 25 percent of new customers from the web. Oriental Trading Company now sells four out of five of their products online.

The search giant is facing pressure from the US government for allegedly abusing their position in search and advertising. Mountain View reportedly holds an estimated 65 percent market share.

Adblock Plus to allow non-intrusive ads by default

The popular browser extension Adblock Plus has angered some Webgoers after deciding to stop blocking certain advertisements by default. With previous builds, the add-on would block any ads that it could, but the developer has reconsidered that approach because it discourages users from supporting their favorite sites. The new version will allow "non-intrusive" ads to be displayed, while simultaneously blocking those that are less kosher.

Wladimir Palant has defined some requirements for "acceptable" ads: they can't have any animations or sound, no attention-grabbing images, and at most one script that delays page load times. Adblock also hopes to establish mandatory support for Do Not Track, but it's not in a position to enforce that yet. If you're against seeing any ads, you can block everything again by unchecking the "allow non-intrusive advertising" option in "Filter Preferences."

Palant said he must enable the feature by default because it's the only way to get advertisers onboard. He noted that most users won't enable it on their own, simply because they won't tinker with their settings. "In the long term the web will become a better place for everybody, not only Adblock Plus users. Without this feature we run the danger that increasing Adblock Plus usage will make small websites unsustainable."

According to a survey, only 25% of Adblock users oppose all ads and as you might expect, they're the most vocal about this change. The reality is that many sites exist and remain free purely because of ad revenue -- TechSpot included. When you think about it, it's a vicious cycle. People block ads because they're annoying. That dents a site's income and ultimately forces them to seek more lucrative (read: peskier) ads.

That prompts more people to block the site's ads and thus it grows even more desperate. Before you know it, audiovisual billboards bombard you at every turn unless you rely on extensions like Adblock Plus. That's a dramatization of the Internet in 2011, but it's not entirely inaccurate. Being the tech-savvy crowd you are, most of you probably run some form of adblock filter. Are you willing to let "non-intrusive" ads slip through?