Early last month, Twitter revealed its new focus on simplicity and it caught some of Twitter’s hardcore users off guard. The site has become more streamlined to better serve new users who are just learning about the micro-messaging platform, and that’s a good thing.

During its redesign announcement, Twitter introduced us to something new for advertisers called “brand pages“. These pages feature a customizable header and the ability to make on tweet stick to the top of the timeline, as a way to introduce prospective followers to the brand.

At the time, a mix of 21 brands launched their brand pages, but not much was known about why or how they were added to the launch group. According to an AdAge report, we might know now.

According to the report, Twitter has sent emails out to its top advertisers and announced that it will be adding more brand pages starting February 1st. The only ask? That you already have $25k in Twitter’s ad ecosystem, be it for sponsored tweets or trending topics, just to be qualified. Of course Twitter have blessed some charities with brand pages for free, so it doesn’t appear that non-profits will have to buy their way in.

Not much is known about how effective these brand pages are, like the one above from Nike. However, it appears that Twitter is dangling the feature out there as an added incentive to get advertising dollars from new blood. By offering this incentive in the way that it has, Twitter comes off looking pretty desperate to make $25k. On Facebook, companies don’t have to pay any money at all to have a business presence on the platform.

This latest brand page thing sounds to me like the new verified account, as it’s something the company can toggle on and off in hopes of making a company feel special on its platform. In my opinion, it’s going to take a lot more than that.

In a comScore study posted today, we are reminded of what we already knew; Facebook is an absolute beast when it comes to cornering people’s time online.

For example, this stat seemed so insane, I thought it was fake at first:

Social networking accounts for nearly 1 in every 5 minutes spent online in October 2011

Social networking is a hobby of 82 percent of the global Internet population, which sits at around 1.2 billion users. Just a reminder, Facebook has over 800 million users. Facebook most definitely owns social networking.

Stats and Thoughts

In October, Facebook reached more than half (55 percent) of the world’s global audience and accounted for 1 in every 7 minutes spent online around the world and 3 in every 4 social networking minutes.

Facebook’s users aren’t just loyal, they’re obsessed. These types of numbers show that the features that social network is building have one goal; to keep you on Facebook, and not let you leave. If you take a look at the most recent changes on the site, such as the Ticker and Timeline, they’re built to keep you digging into someone’s profile and content.

In October, Twitter reached 1 in 10 Internet users worldwide, growing 59 percent in the past year.

Facebook’s game is engagement, while Twitter is surging to touch as many people as possible. It’s safe to say that Twitter will never get anywhere close to the engagement numbers that Facebook has, and it doesn’t want them. With its latest redesign, the site is becoming easier to use, as Facebook is becoming more complicated. Twitter is betting that simplicity will win out, and eyeballs for any amount of time is key. The company actually has a shot to get more eyeballs in 2012 than Facebook if it stays focused and keeps being integrated into every mainstream property possible.

People age 55 and older represented the fastest-growing age segment in global social networking usage, increasing nearly 10 percentage points since July 2010 to 80 percent in October 2011.

Have you noticed that it’s not just your friends and college buddies on Facebook anymore? Mom’s using it, grandma’s using it, cousins, uncles, everyone. This will be an interesting trend to watch, because I think that this particular age group will be the one that gets Facebook to 1 billion users.

Survey says? We’re obsessed. Seriously, and in some cases unhealthily, obsessed with social networking.

Will the obsession turn into dollars?

2011 was the year of data collection. Facebook and Twitter have made its services easier to use so you can share more. The sites know a lot about you based on the things you’ve told them, so 2012 will be the year of capitalizing on it.

Facebook will be placing ads in the News Feed next year, and is hoping to collect your clicks and crank up those ad dollars before it goes public. Twitter is planning similar advertising approaches, hoping to capitalize on your obsessive use of the service, with an ad that fits your likes.

We know that ads are coming, but “will they work?” is the true question. Seeing as Google AdWords have done quite well for the company, they probably will.

Why? Because Google was the first online service that people got obsessed with. “Facebooking” is the next “Googling”, and the money will follow. We’re obsessed with TV, too. Advertising on television isn’t what it used to be though, mainly because of the Internet. What are we doing instead of watching TV? We’re on Facebook.

Get the picture? Obsession = $$$.

If you operate or work for a nonprofit organization, you know that the road to donations to keep you afloat is a bumpy one. Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have made it easier than ever to spread the word about the cause that you work so hard to support.

Twitter specifically has helped pair up celebrities and charities to build a megaphone of social good, giving free advertising to cash-strapped nonprofits who are on the service to get support for cleaner water, those dealing with cancer, and everything else in between.

Up until now, Twitter has helped some of those organizations get attention, although not officially. The company says that it has given over $300,000 worth of pro-bono advertising to 50 organizations to date by way of promoted accounts and tweets.

Twitter is now making this service official, calling it “Ads for Good”.

Here’s what the company had to say on its advertising blog today:

Today we’re expanding our pro-bono ads program – now called Twitter Ads for Good – and unveiling a new fund designated for non-profits in our hometown of San Francisco. By providing grants for San Francisco organizations, we’re extending a hand to the non-profits that work hard to make our city a better place to live.

To apply for a Twitter Ads for Good campaign, complete this contact form and detail how your organization would benefit from one of these grants. For FAQ on these programs, please see here and follow @twittergood for the global highlights.

The company is now accepting applications from properly setup 501c3 organizations, via its Hope140 site.

In addition to pro-bono advertising, Twitter has given 21 lucky organizations an enhanced profile page, which launched last week.

These organizations include @kiva, @jobsforusa, @roomtoread, @globalcitizenyr, @redcross, and @gaffta.

Who said ads were evil? Here’s a way to make advertising more relevant to users, by making them care about what they’re clicking on. That’s donation by action, folks.

It’s always nice to see a platform use its power for social good, and Twitter has been doing it in one way or another since launching. Now it’s official.

There’s no doubt about it, marketing on Facebook is something businesses are doing more and more as the social network grows closer to one billion members. The Facebook ad team has actually done a wonderful job working with engineers at the company to build an easy to use, self-service ad product that makes Google AdWords targeting seem silly and incomplete.

You can target Facebook ads to people of a certain age, location, or area of interest. You can get really focused with your marketing.

This infographic from Flowtown shows survey results the company collected about who is marketing on Facebook. Impressively, 69% of the businesses they spoke with are utilizing Facebook for this very purpose. The infographic also shows that Health Care is the most expensive industry to market on Facebook, and it would cost you upwards of $320,000 to get 300,000 likes on your Facebook page. Wowser.

Click here to see it in its full glory:

It appears that Cup of Noodles is on an advertising tear in Japan, with the following video involving Yoda of Star Wars fame:

Speaking of celebrity endorsements, it’s safe to say that no matter what Yoda gets behind, it’ll be a hit. If only it had this playing in the background.

Today, Google announced a new initiative from its ad team called “Why these ads”. The reason behind the feature, the company says, is to bring transparency to ad targeting. The feature is available now for ads shown within search results, and will be rolling out for ads in Gmail soon.

Advertising is at a crossroads online. With content flowing, companies are trying to find new ways to make ads relevant and attractive to consumers. Google wants to show you a little bit of what’s in its secret sauce.

Here’s what Google had to say about consumers interacting with Google ads:

Our advertising system is designed to show the right ad to the right person at the right time. Because ads should be just as useful as any other information on the web, we try to make them as relevant as possible for you. Over the coming weeks, we’re making improvements to provide greater transparency and choice regarding the ads you see on Google search and Gmail. Soon, you’ll be able to learn more about these ads by clicking the “Why these ads” link next to ads on Google search results and Gmail.

Here’s a video about the two new transparency features from Google:

Along with “Why these ads”, Google now offers an Ads preference manager.

Why these ads

If you wonder why you’re targeted with certain ads, Google will now do its best to tell you why. Of course it has to do with what you search and click on, but showing the “why” is a smart move by Google. If consumers trust the ads, they will be more apt to click and act upon them.

This is what Google had to say specifically about “Why these ads”

“Why these ads” gives you transparency
The perfect search ad answers your query and gets you what you’re looking for quickly. When you click the “Why these ads” link, you’ll find information about why you’re seeing a particular ad and how it’s personalized for you. If you’re searching for a local restaurant while you’re on vacation in Hawaii, you would see ads for restaurants that are nearby, rather than restaurants in your hometown. Or if you’re researching flat-panel televisions, and performing a series of similar searches in quick succession, you could see ads based on the query that you just entered, or based on a few recent and related queries within a single browser session. By considering the language you’re using, your geographic location and various other indications, we’re able to show you the best ads possible. We’ve been showing ads in this way for years as a way to help you quickly find what you’re looking for.

Ads preference manager

Along with showing you why you’re seeing certain ads, you will now have access to an “Ads preferences manager“. The preferences manager lets you decide which ad providers are blocked, and gives you the opportunity to opt-out of personalized advertising altogether. Clearly that’s not something that Google wants, but surfacing it as an option certainly is putting it in the hands of its users.

This type of interaction with advertisements that you see online is the only way that big companies like Google and Facebook can get you interested in them again. Of course Google lets you “+1″ an ad that you find interesting, but it’s unlikely that ads alone are worth sharing. The reasoning behind why you saw a specific ad? Now that’s something to talk about.

We first met with Jason L. Baptiste and Andres Barreto, the founders of Onswipe on a snowy day in late January in New York City for an interview titled, Forget apps, Onswipe is the future of publishing. The two entrepreneurs were poised for the age of the tablet, both passionate writers who wanted to make their content look beautiful on the iPad. Armed with skills in coding and software development, and support from TechStars‘ mentors, Baptiste and Barreto, along with their third co-founder Mark Bao, have been tirelessly working to make the publishing experience more enjoyable for the reader from both the editorial experience and the advertising side. Today, Onswipe launches to the world.

“The tablet is the fastest growing piece of consumer electronics ever. In the future, everything will be touch. You already see little kids nowadays, confused as they touch their unresponsive television sets. Touch is going to be the entire web and Onswipe will be providing the premier monetization engine for it and its publishers. It will be the beauty of print with the scale and data of Google or DoubleClick… Yes, it’s an audacious goal. But we get a chance to change everything and rewrite all the rules. We want a completely different conversation. And we want people to do that with us. ”

-Jason L. Baptiste

To explain a complicated technical process as simply as possible, the Onswipe platform organizes a publisher’s content into a customizable, design conscious, mobile and tablet friendly format. In just under 3 minutes, Onswipe delivers an app-like experience within the web browser. Earlier this spring, Onswipe partnered with WordPress.com to power the tablet experience of over 18.5 million blogs via the service. And over the past few months, signups for the platform have been in the tens of thousands.

Onswipe works with publishers of any size, whether their audience consists of 100 people or 1 million and doesn’t charge for its platform but instead sees itself as a partner and monetizes by taking a small percentage of their advertising revenue. The revenue model is competitive with industry standards on other platforms, and is adjusted on a case by case basis, in particular with Onswipe’s Icon Partnership platform, which is for larger publishers that have their own ad sales teams. With Onswipe, the advertisers receive metrics and scale and publishers are monetizing web content at a much higher value than before. As the value of the CPM increases, Onswipe makes additional, incremental revenue.

“We don’t make money until you make money,” says Baptiste. But Onswipe has already made publishers a significant amount of money, according to the 25-year old CEO. Onswipe’s 8-10 launch partners include The Next Web, Gary Vaynerchuk, Hollywood.com, Stocktwits and Geek.com, as well as Icon partners Marie Claire, in an ad partnership with American Express and Slate, in an ad partnership with Sprint. Credit for the creative goes to Ogilvy and Mindshare for the two launch campaigns.

“We want to optimize Slate for every platform so our readers can consume Slate content wherever, however and whenever they want,” said John Alderman, General Manager of The Slate Group and Publisher of Slate. “We’re thrilled to be partnering with OnSwipe and Sprint on this latest incarnation of Slate that leverages HTML5 to bring an app-like experience to the iPad browser. “

Onswipe is the technology that joins publishers and advertisers together in the tablet web era. For the publishers who have resented the way technology has changed the industry in the past decade, Onswipe is helping them to maintain the beauty that advertising creatives deserve. Baptiste tells them that “apps are bullshit” and it’s all about making money off the tablet web. ”The banner ad is on life support, it just doesn’t work on the web or the tablet,” says Baptiste. Onswipe aims to deliver ads that people would want to rip out and put on the wall, to the tablet web.

OnSwipe believes its ad platform for tablets will trump both Apple’s iAd mobile advertising network and Google AdSense. “We’re creating something that the best creative agencies around the world can get excited about. No one ever remembers a Google ad. In fact, we dont think Google AdSense will work in the tablet world. But if you think of the past few decades of advertisements, you remember Got Milk, Just Do It, etc.,” says Baptiste. So far, the feedback from brands and agencies has been extremely positive.

“Think about those beautiful full page ads in magazines like GQ or Marie Claire. Let the art work and the photography speak for itself. We want to take your existing print creative, upload it and layer on slight modular activity such as geolocation so users have the ability to see stores nearby. We let you build something that is as beautiful as a print ad in the time it would take to set up a Google Ad words campaign,” says Baptiste.

Co-founder and CTO Mark Bao (the brilliant 19-year old entrepreneur whom they convinced to leave school), came aboard officially in June and has started working on “myOnswipe,” a feature that allows Instapaper-like offline reading, in the browser and in HTML5.  myOnswipe will allow readers to see what their friends are reading as well. So you’ll be able to take the subway in New York and continue reading an awesome TNW article on your iPad. It’s like having the Internet without any Internet as well.

Onswipe raised $5 million in a “Series Awesome” round led by Spark Capital, Lightbank, Yuri Milner, Lerer Ventures, SVAngel, Betaworks, Morado, Eniac and Thrive Capital, totaling $6 million in funding to date. Baptiste hopes to use the funding to scale his current team of 10 to 20-25 people in the next year, introducing a mix of engineering and business development positions.

But just a little bit of that funding money might go towards celebrating (deservedly!). This week, the Onswipe gentlemen will be renting out New York’s posh Soho House to celebrate the launch of their long-awaited, brilliantly easy tablet publishing platform. The event will bring together all the partners, advertisers and people who’ve been involved with Onswipe, featuring a 15-minute keynote talk by Jonathan Klein, the former president of CNN, who’s an advisor and close friend to Onswipe.

As one of Onswipe’s launch partners, be sure to check out how stunning our site looks on your iPad or iPhone this week. More announcements to come.

Let me repeat the question: Would you turn your house into a billboard to live mortgage free?

Yes? You are in luck! Because one advertising company named Adzookie is doing just that: turning homes into billboards and helping homeowners pay their mortgage. Adzookie was first a free, mobile advertising company, but they’ve decided to take a bit of a pivot So far 223 homeowners have contacted them as well as 12 businesses, 7 restaurants and 1 church.

“Adzookie.com is a free mobile advertising company. We help local businesses reach new customers by placing free advertisements where ads get noticed the most, on smart phones,” says Romeo Mendoza, Adzookie’s CEO. “Promoting our business in a way that’s outrageous and fun just make sense.”

Mendoza says he was inspired while driving his daughter home from school.

“I saw signs outside homes saying ‘bank-owned’ and suddenly I felt for the families I imagined lived there,” said Mendoza. “I was trying really hard to think of ways to help …then it hit me. Our company buys advertising all the time. We could buy ad space on their house and pay them for it.”

To qualify, you must own your home; no renters or leasers allowed. Adzookie must be able to paint the entire outside of the house, minus the roof, the windows and any awnings. Having your house painted takes about 3-5 days. In exchange, Adzookie will pay the mortgage every month for as long as the house is painted, up to one year.

Interested homeowners apply here and please, please send us pictures. All hilarity aside, Mendoza is serious about this house painting business. And in the end, isn’t the whole promotion a great way for him to get the Adzookie name out there?

Ah, the crazy world of advertising. Interested in outdoor advertising? Don’t miss our recent interview with NYC’s disruptive darling, AdStruc.

However, Gawker was not always so innovative. Their first designs were downright normal. In fact, the first two proposed designs for the website were a bit dull. Here, coming from the designer himself, is the first design submitted to Nick Denton for Gawker in October of 2002:

According to the designer: “Nick [Denton] didn’t like it too much. Background too dark, masthead text not logo-y enough. Two weeks later, I sent him this, with a half-assed technicolor logo that I’d dashed off in Photoshop in like 30 minutes:”

Look familiar? That became the first Gawker design to actually make it into the wild. This is what the site looked like when it was finally launched:

And finally, this is what Gawker looks like today, for better or for worse:

TNW has also gone through big design changes, but with the massively positive response that our current layout has garnered, you have little to fear in terms of us making the site harder to use. Which version of Gawker do you prefer?

Several weeks ago the LA Times faced criticism after it published advertorials with headlines proclaiming absurdities like “Colossal Footprints Found on Beach” and “Universal Studios Hollywood Partially Destroyed.” The articles were dressed up as legitimate editorial content with small — and some would argue unnoticeable — disclaimers that they were ads. Among the Times’ critics was the LA County Board of Supervisors, which issued a letter of protest to Tribune Company owner Sam Zell asking him to cease publishing advertisements in an “offensive and alarming manner.”

But though there were plenty of barbs thrown at the LA Times in the wake of this controversy, there was very little acknowledgment of the fiasco within its own pages. That’s because other than the occasional ombud op-ed, staff writers for a traditional news source are not given the space to criticize their own employer. Whatever unease LA Times reporters might have felt would have been expressed privately amongst themselves or not at all. The idea of penning harsh detractions of those who signed their paychecks would be unthinkable.

Why is it, then, that bloggers regularly engage in this seemingly unthinkable act? Back in late February, The Atlantic rolled out a site redesign that aggregated previously-independent blogs into “channels,” making it extremely difficult to follow a particular blogger on the site (Andrew Sullivan, the magazine’s biggest traffic source, was the one exception). Though there was some indication the bloggers had known the redesign was coming, most were seemingly caught off-guard once it had been put into effect. We know this because many of them took to their blogs to complain.

“Treating blogs as a series of headlines, designed to maximize pageviews, is a deep misunderstanding of blogs, their reader communities and their integrity,” Andrew Sullivan wrote. “I hope they get restored to their previous coherence, and these amorphous ‘channels’ gain some editorial identity.” His colleague, James Fallows, expressed similar concerns, writing, “it is no secret within our organization that I think the new design creates problems for the magazine’s ‘personal’ sites, like the one I have been running here these past few years. In particular, the new layout scheme — in which you see only a few-line intro to each post but no pictures, block quotes, or other amplifying material — unavoidably changes the sensibility and tone of personal blogs.”

There were many who found this internal bickering to be great theater, but for me it was a radical example of journalistic transparency. Here were a number of bloggers writing for a respectable magazine engaging in a meta conversation with their own readers. Their responses were not obfuscated by a cloud of PR say-nothingness, but rather they embarked on a frank discussion that clearly addressed the elephant in the room. During the entire episode — one in which the Atlantic web editors made several changes to address the concerns — the conversation remained respectful yet firm. Much has been written about the abundance of media criticism that the blogosphere offers — criticism that was sorely lacking in the pre-Web 2.0 days — but here was an example where a mainstream publication could open the floodgates and have a direct dialog with its readers.

This incident was not an anomaly. Given the collective bargaining power needed to amass ad dollars, many popular independent bloggers have handed over their sidebars and headers to large blog networks, trusting them to seek out advertisers in return for a percentage of revenue. The larger networks can sometimes contain hundreds of bloggers and sell access to their blogs as packaged deals, meaning a single ad will be displayed across dozens of blogs within a network. In most cases, this is ideal for the blogger because he can focus on creating content without having to waste time chasing down advertisers. But occasionally this can lead to an ad placement with which the blogger doesn’t agree, and this is when controversy erupts.

Take, for instance, the Scienceblogs network, which faced a revolt from over a dozen of its own bloggers a few weeks ago when it decided to launch a corporate blog sponsored by Pepsi. The blog — since taken down — resembled all the other blogs on the network and was aggregated alongside them in its main news feed. Perhaps most outrageously, the corporate-penned posts were being indexed in Google News, which has a high bar of entry for what news sources it allows. The science bloggers were not happy that their journalistic integrity had been compromised so haphazardly.

“The major problem wasn’t necessarily that an advertorial went up, it was that [Seed Media]” — the company that owns Scienceblogs — “didn’t give us any indication of what was going on,” Brian Switek told me in a phone interview. Switek is a science writer who left the network in protest of the Pepsi decision. “All of a sudden we have this new blog that’s entirely run by Pespi staff and overseen by Pepsi with no editorial oversight from Scienceblogs.”

For Switek, the incident chipped into the “general credibility that Scienceblogs has tried to create since its inception in terms of inviting people with great science writing with integrity who aren’t shills for certain companies.” He alleged that Seed knew ahead of time that its bloggers wouldn’t like the campaign, and that’s why it didn’t give any warning and ultimately was so slow to respond to the outrage. But despite this lack of transparency, the science blogger admired the fact that Seed didn’t attempt to censor any of the backlash. “For all my other criticisms, I really have to credit Seed with not editing any of the criticism, not taking it down, not telling us that we can’t make those comments.”

Peter Lipson, another Scienceblogs blogger who exited the network, felt that the incident indicated a clear misunderstanding of the nature of blogging. “I think in many ways it appears that Seed’s leadership doesn’t understand what Scienceblogs is after all this time,” he said, “or what blog networks like that are, in the sense that you have all these independent people who might hate each other, like each other, whatever, but pretty much all of whom value the appearance of independence. And when you put something in the same space that looks identical to the independent content but isn’t, it can degrade the credibility of the truly independent voices.”

Some blog networks have anticipated this problem and have taken steps to avoid it. The North Carolina-based company Blogads was one of the first companies on the scene to offer scalable blog advertising. Launched in 2002 by CEO Henry Copeland, it now boasts hundreds of blogs within its network, including traffic giants like Daily Kos and Perez Hilton. “Bloggers — back then in those days — none of them had any desire to make money,” Copeland told me in a phone interview. “And the idea that you’d put an ad on their personal space was really kind of revolting. So we right from the get-go realized we had to build a tool so a blogger could accept or reject every ad.”

Bloggers in the Blogads network are organized in hives — or niche channels — that allow advertisers to target a specific demographic and pick which blogs they want to sponsor. The ads are often uploaded by the advertisers themselves and then the blogger must approve or reject the ads before they’re displayed. Copeland said that this gives both the advertiser and the blogger the maximum amount of choice and control over their content. “Our experience is that it increases the value of the advertising, that it’s not run by this giant factory or this algorithm,” he said. “It’s a human process. I, the advertiser, have selected your blog and you, the blogger, have said, ‘yes, I’m going to accept running this ad on my blog.’”

But though this method works for the initial ad approval, many advertisers sometimes like to test dozens of modifications of their ads to see which versions have maximum impact. Forcing a blogger to approve every single version would be a time-consuming and inefficient process, so once a blogger has approved the ad then the advertiser can make changes to it. Occasionally, one of these changes might offend the blogger. Copeland said that to counter this, Blogads created a “pause” feature that allows the blogger to put the ad on hold temporarily while he negotiates with the advertiser to change the copy. “We get that a lot when it comes to T-shirt vendors,” Copeland said. “The T-shirt company will push the envelope as far as they possibly can to put up a controversial message and the bloggers will often say, ‘I don’t really endorse that extreme point of view, can you take it down and put something up that’s more innocuous?’”

The Blogads CEO said that political advertisers sometimes even “have fun” submitting ads they know will be rejected by a blogger on the opposite end of the political spectrum. “If you’re playing your cards right, you can spark conversation and get people to pay attention. And sometimes sending it out to someone you know disagrees with it, you know they’re going to run the ad and readers are going to talk about it and get pissed off. Or sometimes they’re going to reject the ad and say, ‘can you believe these buffoons tried to buy an ad on my site?’”

I asked Copeland whether he thought bloggers who turned on their advertisers and networks were essentially biting the hands that fed them. Is it a good idea for bloggers to burn bridges? “We’ve had numerous folks get pissed off at us over the years, and it used to bother us a lot,” he replied. “In the early days, when we were the only show in town, we felt kind of bad. It was like, ‘yeah, that’s a good idea, but that’s not the way our software works.’ Now we say, ‘hey that’s a good idea, we’ll try to incorporate it if we can, but otherwise there are other services out there you’re welcome to try.’” Some bloggers did just that when they left Blogads several years ago to join the conservative Pajamas Media, a venture that ended up mostly failing (though some bloggers and vloggers still remain on its payroll).

It has always been the accepted practice that there should be an unassailable wall between the editorial side of a publication and the advertising side, lest reporters be accused of bias for financial reasons. But the idea of bloggers attacking or commenting on their own advertising can also create an aura of independence. After all, what better way to prove you’re not beholden to the hand that feeds you than opening your mouth wide and clamping your incisors down on it. Whether that same hand will continue to feed you afterward is another issue entirely.