In all, it cost me about a half hour of my time and not a single penny of my income. And boy do I feel good about myself.

“Click donation” sites take the traditional pay-per-click business model and apply it to the various fields of charity work being done to improve our world. The sites base themselves around one or more legitimate charity organizations, bring in advertisers who seek exposure in a market of conscientious web surfers, and install a simple “charity click” button on their front page to bring them together. When users click on the button, they are presented with a banner ad, and the sponsor donates a set amount of money/food/books/etc. to the charity on the user’s behalf.

The simple and logical formula has proven hugely successful on all fronts. Advertisers have the rare chance to get their message in front of a receptive audience with a newfound trust and appreciation for their brand. Charity organizations have raised staggering amounts of money for their causes on a few of the major click donation sites alone. And best of all—once established, the process repeats itself over and over as users flock back to the site to give and give and give and give.

The original click donation site, HungerSite.com, is still the most trafficked and expansive one of the bunch. Since it launched in 1999 (briefly shutting down after the dot com burst and reopening in 2001), Hunger Site has donated 300 million cups of staple food to needy people in countries such as Bosnia, Lebanon, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Honduras, Mozambique, Eritrea and the United States. It works with the charities Mercy Corps and America’s Second Harvest, two trusted and respected organizations, who distribute the food.

Hosting over 3.5 million unique visitors a month, Hunger Site is a great example of the huge potential the click donation model affords enterprising advertisers. Every time a user clicks the donation button, they are taken to a separate page with the sponsor’s banner ad and a solicitation to “Please click every day and thank our sponsors.”

This space is ideal for smaller-name brands looking to reach proactive, issue-conscious consumers with a grassroots approach. When people feel like they’ve collaborated with an advertiser on a worthwhile project, they are much more likely to take their message to heart.

Hunger Site itself operates a network of click donation sites which address different pressing concerns in our world, including Breast Cancer Site, Child Health Site, Literacy Site, Rainforest Site, and Animal Rescue Site. Other popular click donation sites are EcologyFund.com, RedJellyFish.com, FreeDonation.com, and TheEnvironmentSite.org.

Click donation sites are a refreshing reminder that the Internet is still a viable place for fostering wholesome and progressive campaigns. My only criticism of most of these sites is that while people are clicking to support their causes in huge turnouts, I would guess that many are not taking the time to educate themselves about what they are supporting. When it comes to battling such huge enemies as cancer, AIDS, poverty, homelessness, and environmental destruction, a revenue stream is a positive first step, but awareness itself is the most powerful weapon we have.

Once considered amateurish and ineffective, typosquatting has refined its tactics, enticed the big name ad networks, and become a lucrative stream of emarketing in its own right. Yet as the practice grows in prominence, it raises more and more concerns over trademark infringement and the intentional misleading of web users.

According to recent estimates, about 15 percent of all web traffic originates from users typing directly in to the URL box. As there is obviously no such thing as a spell check for URLs (to date), a good deal of hastily or ignorantly typed addresses are inaccurate. Instead of returning to a dead-end “404 File Not Found” page, these sites started to get bought out and filled with ads relevant to the product or service of the site being emulated.

It didn’t take long for the major ad networks like Google to get in on the profits and start selling inventory to countless typosquatting sites. Operators soon developed programs to devise thousands of misspellings for a given site, register them as domains, and park them on a trial basis to find which provided the most erroneous landings.

Typosquatters have since thought of just about everything. Commas next to periods, phonetic misspellings, abandoned brand names or campaigns, and interchanged address suffixes (such as .com for .org) are all effective strategies.

With the sophistication of typosquatting inevitably came the backlash of the major brands, who justifiably claim the sites make a profit off their names and detract from traffic to their own sites. While they’ve tried a number of methods to combat the practice, such as filing lawsuits and buying out misspelled domains of their own, they have yet to formally define typosquatting as a legal infringement. There is no doubt that typosquatting negatively affects the sites which it parrots to some extent, but determining exactly what constitutes trademark infringement in a web URL is a very subjective matter.

A more legally debatable question at this time is whether or not the sites do more help than they cause harm to the users who find them. In most cases, users will quickly realize their mistake and not think they are actually on the page they intended to visit. And frequently, they are led to sites which can help them find what they need, if not the actual site they attempted to type in.

Yet fundamentally, typosquatting intends to mislead users by utilizing an advance understanding of what they are looking for. On top of that, they frequently transport surfers to sites with pornographic, gambling-related, or otherwise questionable content, an interaction which can incidentally detract from their identification with the brand in question.

Regardless, typosquatting has gained the most valuable currency that exists on the Internet: the support of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. In addition to supplying ad inventory for these sites, the giants have attempted to extend the reach of their search engines by claiming misspelled sites for themselves. Internet Explorer users, for example, are by default greeted with an MSN search box any time they stumble onto a site that is not registered to anyone.

As long as idiocy rages on the Internet, and as long as major companies try to profit from it, typosquatting will continue to be a viable marketing avenue in the online space.

After seven seconds, Slate transported its cowboy and cowgirl readers back to 2006. No, they soon found out, they hadn’t wandered into Rufus’ phone booth or a flux-capacitor-fitted Delorean, they had witnessed an advertisement for PBS’ Texas Ranch House reality show. The ad, cleverly tailored with Slate’s front page in mind, is a telling example of the publisher’s progressive strategy to integrate advertising and editorial content in a manner that is both intriguing and non-intrusive to online readers.

Since Mobil Oil popularized the print advertorial format to combat negative publicity during the energy crisis of the 1970s, advertisers have learned that speaking the same language as publishers is a powerful way to reach audiences. While the advertorials we’re used to seeing in the backs of magazines and editorial sections of the newspaper can be obvious and tacky, they demonstrate that there is a sharp edge to be gained from blending your message into the look and feel of the publication. Rather than barging into the editorial space and shouting technical gibberish at the top of their lungs, advertorials quietly invite the reader over to the corner of the room to chat.

In the online space, the challenge to blend in is still great, but the creative possibilities are endless. With sundry contextual and behavioral targeting tools at their disposal, online advertisers already have a huge leg up on print in terms of getting their message in front of the right users. Substantially and intellectually engaging them with this message, however, requires incorporating the ad into the overall experience of the site.

The PBS Texas Ranch House campaign was just one of Slate’s several recent experiments in creating a new digital breed of advertorial. The publisher’s strategy exhibits respect for the intelligence of its readers while hoping in earnest to provide them with ads which can enrich the experience of the site.

“Slate has been known for a long time as a place with very fresh original editorial content, a fresh take on everything. That’s what our readers love about it,” Cliff Sloan, publisher of Slate and vice president for business development and general counsel at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, tells ADOTAS. “We want to make Slate a site that is known just as much for its original interesting advertising approaches as its original interesting editorial approaches.”

To accomplish this, Slate sits down and initiates a creative dialogue with the advertiser and their agency. “We’re always looking to brainstorm with advertisers about innovative ways of reaching our audience,” Sloan says. This back and forth collaboration allows them to meet at a solution that is attractive to the consumer and on even keel with the tone and layout of Slate’s site.

But in-game advertising is still a long way from becoming a perfect science. Other ad mediums have the advantage of the consumer expecting to find their message when they turn on the TV, computer, or read an article. Game audiences lack this immediate commercial orientation; they are more likely to think of ads as an unwarranted and unprecedented intrusion into their experience. This forces advertisers, in-game agencies and game developers to be flexible and experimental in their approach.

“Gaming, like TV, is an entertainment medium—people’s emotional barriers are down when they’re playing games,” IGA Worldwide’s CEO Justin Townsend tells ADOTAS. “The combination of the effectiveness of the space and the reach makes it a very attractive proposition for advertisers.”

IGA is currently working with developer Simbin to deliver ads in the popular racing title GTR, and a new series based on the World Touring Car Championships. Sports and racing games have been one of the most accessible genres for in-game advertisers, mainly because they simulate environments which are ad-heavy in real life, such as race tracks and stadiums. Instead of being alienated by ads in these titles, many gamers embrace them as contributing to part of the overall realism of the experience.

Counting on this trust from their audience, IGA has developed an advanced philosophy of how to attract their fleeting attention within an environment as unique as a race track. “If you’re racing around an oval track in an Indie car, you’re gonna see lots of sponsorship boards flashing by at a very quick speed,” Townsend explains. “Your exposure to that is going to be minimal—not long enough of a time for somebody to be exposed to an ad and for it to be memorable. So, rather than putting it on a long straight, the ads that you want to be seen by the gamers are going to be in the sharp turns, for example, where people slow down and start braking. It’s about location and contextual relevance.”

For its racing titles, IGA is bringing in a number of advertisers in automotive, foodstuffs, and apparel categories.

Massive, Inc. is under development with another major sports franchise, 2K Sports, and is planning for their upcoming release of Major League Baseball 2K6. Rather than static billboards and other displays which cluttered the landscape of past sports games, Massive and 2K6 will work to incorporate dynamic and fresh brand messaging into the game, mirroring the evolving opportunities for sponsors in live-action sports coverage.

“We are thrilled to work with MLBAM, MLBPA and 2K Sports to leverage and fully extend the advertising potential of this great franchise,” said Mitch Davis, CEO of Massive, in a press statement. “Major League Baseball has already brought significant innovation to advertising in live sports; together, we will now do the same for their video game properties.”

One advertiser has bypassed major game brands and agencies altogether, and is taking the appeal of the medium into their own hands. Although the project is still under wraps, Burger King will soon release three Xbox games which completely revolve around their brand and mascot, the creepily surreal King character. They will sell the fighting, action, and racing titles out of their own fast-food franchises for a mere four dollars—roughly the price of a Whopper.

What is the most effective way to market to gaming audiences? There’s certainly no surefire answer right now, but all of the major players are slowly learning through a process of guess-and-check. As gamers are increasingly exposed to brand messages while they blast away aliens and speed down the racetrack, they will undoubtedly grow more responsive and welcoming to in-game advertisers.

“In-game advertising is too early to be a perfect science,” Townsend admits. “There needs to be acceptance on the advertising side, and there needs to be a common currency. How do you generate a large consumer reach within the networks, and how do you measure the CPM?”

These days, campaign sites which promote the collaboration of two or more companies are a dime a dozen. Too often, and for a variety of reasons, the central purpose of the partnership is lost on the user. In some cases, joint campaigns opt for panache over message, delivering an enticing device like an advergame but incorporating very little brand tie-in. Sometimes, the companies have so little in common that the point of them coming together presents a distracting enigma from the very start.

It’s refreshing, then, to discover Moviefone’s new site, which unites three brands with the 5th Annual Tribeca Film Festival in a single entertaining, useful and meaningful destination. At moviefone.com/tribeca, festival sponsors American Express, Moviefone, and Moviefone’s parent company AOL, each serve a relevant role in creating a community space for filmmakers, attendees and onlookers. The site offers a wealth of original content in its own pages while also cleverly operating as a portal to its sponsors’ own pages.

The site is built into the framework of Moviefone’s existing site, a popular online destination for movie and theater info, tickets, and reviews. Moviefone, it follows, is responsible for a majority of the content. They bring in all the movie-phile goodies you’d expect: festival schedule, ticketing, sneak peeks, red carpet footage, and a “Cinematical” blog with regular updates.

On top of that, they’ve shot their own web-exclusive series, entitled “Unscripted,” in which actor and filmmaker attendees perform candid interviews of one another. “Unscripted” began filming yesterday, on the first day of the festival, and will begin its 10-12 episode run on the site later this week, featuring conversations between David Duchovny and Loan Gruffudd, Rupert Grint and Laura Linney, Jeremy London and Katheryn Winnick, among others.

American Express, a founding sponsor of Tribeca Film Festival, has already branded itself rather memorably with the event over the past five years. A multi-platform campaign in heavy rotation last year featured festival founder Robert De Niro and the tagline “My Life. My Card.” Now American Express is using this recognizable connection and the Moviefone site to spark interest in its “My Life. My Card CLIPS Competition.” This mini film festival solicits amateur filmmakers to send in their own 15-second creations for a chance to win $15,000 and be personally honored at the Tribeca Film Festival’s final awards ceremony.

At first glance, the American Express aspect might seem haphazardly tied in to the bundle, but it really does add depth to the site’s sense of a film festival community. It makes every user a potential filmmaker themselves, and that allows them to see the event from an interesting new perspective. Plus, every site nowadays has something to gain from the quirkiness and hilarity that ensues from user-generated video.

“It felt like a natural allegiance between our strong movie brand and American Express’ commitment—not only to the Tribeca Film Festival—but to really associating their brand with creativity and movie makers and people like that,” Erik Flannigan, Vice President of Entertainment Programming at AOL, tells ADOTAS. “We’re always sensitive to over-sponsored, overbranded, oversold things, but this one felt pretty natural.”

While the AOL name is only subtly incorporated, it brings a very important element to this corporate gumbo. They have embedded portions of their City Guide content into the site in order to root it geographically within the context of the festival’s lower Manhattan neighborhood. Film fanatics—particularly ones visiting from outside of New York—can use City Guide’s Tribeca Film Festival guide to locate restaurants, bars, hotels, and—god forbid—more movie theaters to plan their festival agenda.

Using AOL City Guide to emphasize the local neighborhood was a wise step for Moviefone, because it pays homage to the fact that Tribeca Film Festival was initiated in 2002 to revitalize culture in the area after the devastating attacks of September 11th. If he knew anything about online marketing, festival founder Robert De Niro would be proud.

While they all contribute applicable original content to the Moviefone destination, the partnering sponsors also stand to gain an influx of traffic to their own pages from the numerous links and banner ads placed intelligently around the site. Links to the Tribeca Film Festival official site are also prominently displayed.

Although the festival began only yesterday, AOL’s Flannigan said that the partnership campaign has already surpassed his expectations. “That’s what’s nice, too, with a partnership—that American Express is committed to actually driving people into the experience, not just to brands.”

Roll camera, and play to win at: http://movies.aol.com/tribeca-film-festival-2006/main

Last year, 323 billion print coupons were distributed in the U.S. American shoppers used only 4.5 billion of these coupons, throwing away a potential savings of $315 billion dollars. As more and more consumers abandon print media, a gap in the demand for the age-old marketing model of coupons widens. Advertisers moving to the online space tend to reject the idea of coupons altogether, precisely because they lose their “clip and save” practicality and summon up the archaic image of dotted lines and newsprint.

That is, until now. In the past few months, RSS feeds have begun to revive advertiser and consumer interest in coupons. Online consumers are attracted by the ability to receive instant product updates tailored to their specific areas of interest and geographical location. Online businesses are hypnotically drawn to the RSS model, which relies entirely on their customers opting in to promotions themselves, and supplies their campaign with instant feedback and consumer statistics.

Internet coupon sites such as Coupons.com and MonkeyBargains.com have existed for several years, aggregating promotional deals offered by various advertisers throughout the web into a single database. When a consumer clicks on a particular item on these sites, they are usually taken directly to the manufacturer or retailer, who gives the coupon publisher a percentage of any sales they provide.

Such sites have proven moderately successful, but generally lacked the accessibility they need to reach an audience beyond routine bargain hunters and habitual shoppers. When RSS came under the crosshairs of many different online industries last year, and began to be used to serve many different purposes, coupon sites saw an inroad to the general public.

When affiliate coupon sites discovered the simplicity and low cost (essentially nothing) of operating an RSS feed, implementing them into their site was a no-brainer. MonkeyBargains made this move in August of last year, and has benefited from a tremendous boost to their traffic ever since. “Even though the RSS feeds have taken us practically no time to develop or maintain, they’ve generated approximately 25,000 extra page impressions for us each month,” Melissa Kendall, operator of MonkeyBargains told ADOTAS.

After all, for a site which is constantly changing, there is simply no better exposure than to be in the RSS sidebar of a user’s browser window.

Most recently, Subway has shed its excess pounds and adopted the soon-to-be-NFL-star Reggie Bush as its spokesman. The TV spot, which debuted last week, emphasizes Bush’s superb physical conditioning and youthful personality. More importantly, it invites viewers to “Get the buzz on No. 5″ at subwayfreshbuzz.com, a site where they can read Bush’s own daily blog, view his biography and photo gallery, enter a sweepstakes for a chance to watch Bush play with his new pro team, and even chat with him in-person on select dates.

For the most part, subwayfreshbuzz.com delivers on the in-depth and exclusive Reggie Bush coverage it promises. Currently, the most talked-about figure in all sports, positioned to be the number one pick of the 2006 NFL Draft, and in the prime of his life, Bush is a fascinating subject with an interesting story to tell. He is fresh, and this is the point that Subway wants you to take away more than anything. They rely on an implicit connection between this “fresh” personality and the “fresh”-ness of their ingredients. Yeah, I’m scratching my head, too.

If you’re interested in the athlete and not the sandwiches, there’s plenty for you to enjoy on the site. Bush has updated his blog every day since it kicked off on April 8th, and he’s already done a good job of keeping new fans up to speed by providing anecdotes about his youth and discussions on his influences. I have no doubt that Bush is a bright and talented young man, but he does appear to be getting some kind of help writing the blog. Nonetheless, his story is an original, compelling, and relevant one. There is also a video blog portion of the site, where Bush takes you even further inside his life—like giving you a tour of his USC locker room.

Once you get past the fact that Subway has essentially based an entire multi-platform ad campaign on a pun, there is reason to believe the site will merit some success. For one thing, Subway’s “Eat Fresh” tagline is so well branded already that many people will be inclined to understand the vague connection. And for a fast-food industry under constant scrutiny by concerns over health and obesity, Reggie Bush makes a lot more sense as a spokesperson than Jon Lovitz.

Subwayfreshbuzz.com is currently entirely devoted to Reggie Bush, but it appears this is the first in a series of similar exposés. A sidebar on the site tells users to stay tuned for Subway Freshbuzz Highlights on other up-and-coming stars. The ambiguity here leads me to believe Subway itself sees the success of the site as a tentative matter, and is waiting on signing the next star to see if the campaign was really worth doing it all over again.

If the campaign does continue, Subway needs to better integrate its product and online presence in this viable space it has created. Give us some nutritional information, healthy menu options, and exercise suggestions so we can become lean and strong like a star running back. Give us a more obvious tie-in to Subway’s main site rather than one tiny URL at the bottom of the page. And finally, one thing that should go without saying, give us user-generated content activities—there’s nothing more fresh these days.

While broadband TV providers continue to upgrade their speed, content, and relevance, and newspaper publishers work to aggregate local and national sources and construct user-friendly archives, advertisers have their eye on the next big media gold rush in the online frontier: magazines. They have poked their head into the web to a minimal extent, but trade publications have yet to achieve a stable footing in the online market. A majority of magazine websites contain a fraction of their print counterpart’s content and advertising resources, and offer few extras to someone who has read the magazine. Most of them act as portals to the print copy—judging their success by the number of subscribers they can garner.

What’s wrong with this picture? The consumers are online. The advertisers are online. So what’s stopping magazine publishers from packing a meaty helping of content into their sites?

In her April 3rd article for the New York Times entitled “As Magazine Readers Increasingly Turn to the Web, So Does Condé Nast”, Katharine Q. Seelye proposes a few of the roadblocks to magazine integration online, and highlights publishing giant Condé Nast’s recent attempts to solve this dilemma and up their ante in the online market. Seelye sees less immediate incentive for magazines to take an online turn than their newspaper counterparts. For one, their readership numbers are stagnant, but haven’t yet taken the headfirst dive newspaper readership has. She also believes that magazines have “a more relaxed, if not intimate, relationship with their readers, who tend to set aside precious leisure time to read them.”

It may be true that logging into the Internet doesn’t quite have the same warm feel as curling up on the sofa with a Reader’s Digest, or sitting on the front porch in the summertime with some lemonade and the new Sports Illustrated. But, as studies indicate, the thing we call “precious leisure time”—which used to evoke such quaint images—is being eaten up, minute by minute, by encroaching internet usage. What may be stagnant readership numbers right now will become extremely detrimental numbers as people find more activities that support their lifestyle on the web. If consumers can learn to replace a newspaper with a computer screen in their everyday life, there’s no reason they can’t abandon five dollars of glossy pages in favor of a free website. If publishers fail to understand this, they will collapse.

Condé Nast, the country’s second-leading magazine publisher, has taken notice of the severe danger this trend poses to their business, and made the first baby steps in its online migration. In her article, Seelye takes inventory of the publisher’s few recent successes online, and divulges some of its plans for renovating less trafficked sites. Interestingly, Condé Nast’s sites generate more users when they combine content from several magazines and abandon the explicit brand name of their print counterpart. Epicurious.com, a cooking site combining Gourmet and Bon Appetite, and Style.com, a fashion site combining Vogue and W, have used this formula to moderate success.