When movies shifted from videocassettes to DVD, retailers simply cleared the tapes off the shelves to make room for discs. That’s not so easy now that movies appear poised to follow music onto the Internet.

The shift of music online has hurt stores such as Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Circuit City, and some retailers are looking to avoid a repeat with movies. Wal-Mart has launched its own movie download service, Best Buy is said to be in talks to start one, and Blockbuster explored buying movie download company Movielink earlier this year.

Music and DVDs are important to retailers because they’ve traditionally driven customers to stores. Each week’s new releases give people a reason to come back. And for electronics retailers such as Best Buy Co. Inc. and Circuit City Stores Inc., discs are often a cheap impulse sale, unlike a pricey computer or TV.

Time Warner Inc.’s AOL division will introduce a paid search service on Monday backed by Google Inc.’s technology to help advertisers better target AOL users.

AOL Search Marketplace is part of a December 2005 agreement with Google in which the Web search leader purchased a $1 billion stake in AOL, the online division of the world’s largest media company.

As part of the deal, sponsored links from Google’s AdWords technology appeared on AOL Search pages. AOL Search Marketplace, a customized version of AdWords, now lets advertisers reach AOL Search customers more effectively, AOL said.

The service will help AOL capture advertising dollars from ads linked to search terms in text, in addition to the money it makes from display ads, such as banners. AOL’s search service drew 311 million queries in February, according to tracking firm comScore Media Metrix.

“If I’ve got a relationship with a big marketer and half of their interactive ad spending is going toward something I don’t offer (search advertising), I’m going to want to acquire that capability,” AOL Media Networks President Mike Kelly said in an interview.

Online advertising company DoubleClick Inc. said on Wednesday it will launch an exchange to connect buyers and sellers of digital advertisements in the third quarter.

The DoubleClick Advertising Exchange service is currently being tested in the United States and is expected to be available globally by the end of 2007, the company said in a statement.

Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit have been reported to have expressed interest in purchasing DoubleClick, which is majority-owned by San Francisco-based private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman.

Junior sales staff are most likely to be responsible for technological security breaches at work, according to a British survey.

The poll of 942 IT managers found that salesmen aged between 26 and 35 are most at risk from computer viruses and other online attacks.

Internet security firm MessageLabs, which commissioned the survey, said sales staff were too busy to worry about protecting themselves and their company from fraud.
“They are the natural multi-taskers,” MessageLabs’ Chief Security Analyst Mark Sunner told Reuters. “They’re going to be on the phone, browsing the Web and using instant messaging all at the same time.

Yahoo Inc. is seeing a rapid transition by customers to its highly anticipated Web search advertising system meant to compete with rival Google Inc., its chief executive said on Tuesday.

Chairman and CEO Terry Semel said the Internet media giant is prepared to begin the commercial introduction of the new advertising system on February 5, or about a month earlier than many Wall Street analysts had anticipated.

“I’m happy to report that we have successfully transitioned the large majority of our revenue to the new search system known as Project Panama,” Semel told investors during a conference call, referring to major U.S. advertisers.

Semel said existing search ad customers would be converted to the new ad system by the end of the first quarter, leading to revenue improvements from the second quarter forward.