I've been given a heads up that has done some excellent sleuthing and investigation into hijacked LJ affiliate links:

What is LJ doing to my links?
What is LJ doing to my links? Part 2
What is LJ doing to my links? Part 3

Expect this post to be update through the day as I find out more and come up with a good summary.

ETA: No good summary, but ( Read more... )

marta (who I am ever grateful for) has confirmed that the Best Buy ad is an approved LiveJournal ad; however, there has been a change in the ad's presentation, in that it no longer automatically plays audio.

Additionally, Frequently Asked Question #265: What are LiveJournal's guidelines on acceptable ads? has been modified, as the Best Buy ad trips ( Read more... )

( Passing username in flash embed variables )

The current news post is about the Advisory Board, but the previous post on LJ's 10th birthday had an interesting level of partnerships and marketing in it. ( More about the news post. )

LJ's sales page says that "During 2009 LiveJournal is relaunching its brand and service."

SUP has LJ news items about completing an advertising sales representative agreement with MediaCorp in Singeapore (Feb 9th) and another exclusive agreement with sales house FISH for Ukrainian traffic (Jan 28th)LJ has also just moved away from Six Apart ad ( Read more... )

Ads? In my secure login page? It's more likely than you think.

So, now what are the option(s) for logging in without ads?

As we noted in our last News post, as of today users will be able to downgrade their account to Basic through the Manage Account page. In addition, visitors who are not logged in to LiveJournal will now be seeing ads on Basic accounts and communities; the experience of logged-in users will not change.Consequently, all Basic and Early Adopters ( Read more... )

We've spotted a code change that adds what appears to be a web bug (since the code returns the HTML for a 1x1 image) for each RSS post in SUP journal feeds; the image uses the SUP_BASE_ADCALL_URL, so although it may not have anything to do with ads, it seems to involve the ad server in some way. It's conceivable this will be used to give SUP users ( Read more... )

I'm not surprised that this escaped notice, between Basic Accounts, censored interests, and contemptuous Russians, but sponsored styles are back.

There are three new featured themes, by "HP.com/gwen", which you can access directly here. Each contains some kind of embedded web bug in the header that links through doubleclick.net to some page on HP ( Read more... )

From the code, it looks like this will affect all non-paid users, not just Plus users as previously seen.

The ad being added, with the links in bold:MSN delivers the latest in News & Politics and Entertainment straight to LiveJournal. [WEB BUG]
It's possible this might hint at some future integration and promotion of MSN on the LiveJournal site ( Read more... )