The Beacon breakup stems from a 2008 suit filed against Facebook in which users complained the site and Beacon were invading their privacy and ruining surprises, like engagements and holiday gifts. After much back-and-forth, Facebook previously agreed to let users turn off Beacon, but have now totally given up on the relationship. Instead they're announcing a new "multi-year, strategic alliance" deal with Nielsen:

Nielsen BrandLift, a release explained, is the first product created from the deal. It will use opt-in polls on Facebook's home page to gauge user sentiment around advertisements, measuring "aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability, and purchase consideration." It'll roll out in the U.S. to a number of test partners this week and to all advertisers over the next few months.

The effort will, they hope, help gauge users interests and then convince advertisers to spend more money on the site. Speaking of money, as part of the Beacon suit, Facebook has agreed to donate $9.5 million to create a privacy-advocacy group. And that group, we're sure, will keep detailed records on its members.

Image via pshab's flickr.

The number of users for Facebook continues to climb in the U.K. Our internal monthly active user numbers rose between December and January in the U.K. and are now at more than 8.3 million. Facebook tracks active monthly users, rather than registered user or unique visitors. Active users reflect those who have used the site in the past 30 days.

As long as viewers can't click on a television commercial or otherwise alert an advertiser that their pitch succeeded or failed, TV commercials will remain undertargeted and obnoxious. Yes, that means Chevy will continue to tell you this is our country for quite some time.

Here's what I think Brin meant to say, but couldn't.

Google is currently testing TV advertising with satellite provider EchoStar, which just purchased Sling Media. Sling Media makes a device called the Slingbox. It relays television through the Internet for viewing on a PC.

If Google were to introduce an advertising unit similar to its YouTube InVideo ads for this subset of TV viewers, it could, perhaps, start to make TV advertising as accountable as Brin suggested it already was.

When a Google TV/EchoStar advertiser's commercial shows up on a PC screen through a Slingbox, Google could make a link to the advertiser available. Then, Google would have click-through data and actual accountability. But not until then.

For now, all Google can determine is whether a given TV set is actually turned on and tuned to a specific channel at the time an ad runs; it also claims to detect when people change channel in the middle of an ad. But if you go to the toilet mid-ad? Google has no clue. The fact that it had to turn to Nielsen to supplement this with demographics about the people watching an ad just goes to show how weak Google's TV-ad data really is. Funny how no one seems to be holding Google accountable for this.

(Photo by danagraves)

To Ritholz, this spells some kind of Internet apocalypse, bringing an end to reliable measures of traffic. The big media companies, in their efforts to become ad reps for smaller blogs, are insidiously "buying" traffic. "Reuters is creating a new financial 'blog ghetto,'" Ritholz fumes. And advertisers, he claims, should be wary.

Nonsense. For one thing, blogs are already in a ghetto, too small, one by one, to even show up in Nielsen's and ComScore's measurements. These agreements are routine, and, in fact, required by Nielsen and ComScore, rather than pushed by the media companies — that explains why the contracts Ritholz has seen are all so similar. And why are they required?

For advertisers, of course. Media buyers understand that they're buying ads that run across a network of websites, and of course want to know the traffic for the entire network, not just the flagship property. So if, say, Reuters salespeople are now selling ads on a bunch of financial blogs, they'll naturally want to report that traffic as part of the advertising buy.

In his effort to spin this as some kind of industry-destroying conspiracy, Ritholz misses out on the natural trend. Naive bloggers like to think that their websites are unique, and that advertisers will want to seek out their audiences, however microscopic, for their special charms.

Charming, but false, of course. Advertising remains a numbers game, a scale business. And Ritholz's hand-waving conspiracy theories just serve to obfuscate the main issue here.

Small blogs have a number of hard choices. First, there's signing up with the likes of Google AdSense, the online-ad networks which pay ludicrously low amounts — low, of course, being better than nothing. Then there's striking an alliance with an online ad-rep firm like Federated Media, or a large media company which chooses to have its salesforce act as third-party ad reps. Lastly, there's the hardest choice of all: Actually spending money to hire your own salespeople. Which, of course, will be tough going if your blog traffic isn't high enough to register on Nielsen or ComScore's listings. (Photo by ">king-edward)