in the first quarter of 2010, according to data released this month from comScore. That’s 15 percent higher than during the same period of 2009, an indicator to some that the online advertising market is growing.

plus an additional $50,000 spending commitment, according to the company’s rate card. The Business Insider has reported that the spot is occupied 90% of the time.

Traffic spikes can be difficult or impossible to monetize for newspaper websites.

For news websites, big stories often mean big traffic. That traffic can come when a local story goes national, when a story gains profile through social media recommendations, or when an item gets prominent placement on a news aggregator.

But even though web advertising is often sold by “impressions”, the number of views an ad gets, big traffic doesn’t typically mean big money for news sites seeing a traffic spike. That’s because media companies typically only sell the number of impressions they expect to have, unable to foresee breaking news events that may significantly increase their inventory. So when that inventory runs out, many news organizations turn to less-profitable remnant advertising (typically yielding less than $1 per 1,000 impressions), while bandwidth costs and other expenses associated with keeping a busy site online continue to increase.

“Everything happens so fast,that there’s no real way to sell more advertising. By the time you’ve figured out what’s happening, the peak is over,” Al Gibes of the Las Vegas Review-Journal said during a Newspaper Association of America session on the topic.

The New York Times received 9 million pageviews in two hours from a link on the Yahoo home page, but that had little financial reward for the newspaper, which turned to remnant advertising.

Remnant advertising isn’t unique to the Web, but the problems it presents for online media are. Television stations often sell off unused airtime and newspapers sell off unused page inches. It’s a win-win situation for ad buyers and media companies. Ad buyers get bargain deals and media companies unload inventory that would have otherwise gone to public service announcements or “house ads” for no compensation at all.

Internet remnant advertising greatly differs because of the amount of remnant inventory. Television and radio stations are always dealing with a finite amount of advertising space — there are only so many minutes in a day. Newspapers typically only sell remnant advertising to fill in gaps between other ads, and remnant print ads are usually small as a result.

Online there is a significantly higher amount of advertising inventory, meaning there is also more remnant inventory. Additionally, advertisements can be centrally stored on a server and distributed to an entire network of websites as soon as a site dips into its remnant inventory, eliminating the need for ad buyers to make last-minute decisions, which could be necessary when purchasing from legacy media.

The network aspect can additionally lower the amount of money media companies make from remnant advertising. When advertisements are purchased directly from a media company, those ads are specifically targeted to that site’s users. As a result, those local advertisements often draw a higher price. With ad networks, purchasers typically buy into a channel — news sites or travel sites, for example. Some networks can also target by everything from credit score to age to the number of children a user has, based on someone’s behavior on the Internet (more on behavioral targeting, employed by the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, here), sometimes increasing the price of network ad purchases.

Even with targeting and other technologies, remnant advertising is still far less profitable to media companies. Traffic spikes also often bring “fly-by” users to a site from outside a news operation’s market that aren’t potential consumers for local advertisers, driving up traffic numbers without truly increasing value for all ad buyers. That phenomenon is more acceptable for national news organizations than it is for local media.

Media companies are looking for solutions to increase the value of traffic spikes. News organizations have a unique problem that many don’t have to deal with, though: breaking news. It’s impossible for media managers to anticipate natural disasters or when a local story by gain a national media mention. Ad networks are also working to enhance inventory prediction algorithms to compensate for annual events, such as the annual product announcements from Apple that swamp tech blogs.

Others, such as Neil Monnens, co-founder of media buyer GoodHandsMedia, have suggested that media companies need to drop prices across the board, instead of relying on higher ad rates guaranteed by finite ad inventories in legacy media (print and television). That would theoretically allow publishers to sell more of their inventory, relying less on remnant advertising in a pinch.

Does the reduced value (at least in the current environment) of such traffic spikes decrease the value of inclusion in search engines and other services that bring in new users? Do those outside users interfere with a news organization’s ability to communicate with its core audience? Is it ethical for media companies to enter into deals with those who are sending the links, such as the one proposed here, to attempt to monetize this traffic? And what solutions can the advertising industry deliver to attempt to remedy the issue?

Many of these networks are for-profit undertakings much like the major social networks. But others are marketer-driven networks launched by companies to promote their brands and cater to their most loyal users.

These networks facilitate collaboration among groups that was previously difficult or impossible by gathering hyper-engaged aficionados together using the Internet, overcoming previously prohibitive geographic barriers.

The major social networks have features built-in that allow users to self-segment and gather into groups already. That’s nothing new. And brands can create pages and personas on most of the popular social networks that can allow users to connect around their brands.

Niche social networks, however, are custom-built to meet the specific needs of users in the communities they aim to attract. Take BakeSpace, a site for cooks, as an example. BakeSpace has features that facilitate easy recipe-swapping, and allows members to “follow” other members to see what they’re friends on the site are cooking for each meal.

Sites like BakeSpace have sprung up for just about every topic. There’s ASmallWorld for high rollers, Pet Crash for pet lovers, SuperGlued for concertgoers, Birdpost for birdwatchers, the list goes on. In news, the New York Times is experimenting with TimesPeople and BusinessWeek is experimenting with Business Exchange. Check out this database for an idea of what is out there.

Because these networks are so focused they’re also going after a different type of advertising, often at a higher price. For 2009, 28.2% of the ad spending on social networking is expected to be outside of the big two social networks. Some say that’s because niche networks are able to target advertisements with much more certainty than the big social networks are.

While Facebook can employ a user’s location or age to target advertisements, niche social networks are able to provide ad buyers with users who have specifically defined interests. And other targeting methods, such as behavioral targeting, which tracks users and targets them based on their online activity, has drawn ire from the Federal Trade Commission because of privacy concerns.

That is just increasing the push to these “niche” or “vertical” social networks for some advertisers.

“Companies are learning that these smaller communities may reach people that are more valuable to their brands,” Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research, told the Washington Post. “It will someday feel more like information than marketing.”

Some, however, such as eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson, have wondered about the long-term viability of many of these platforms. That’s partially being blamed on increased consumer usage of social networks, without advertising dollars to match in the down economy.

“With US ad revenue growth slowing, smaller and niche social networks will have a tough time gaining traction and several may close up shop or be acquired by larger players,” Williamson wrote. “In addition, marketers that have built standalone social networks tied to their brands will either close them or migrate them to existing social network platforms where they can reach a broader audience.”

However niche networks evolve they’re an important trend to watch for anyone in advertising or marketing. With that in mind, there are several unanswered questions about the future of the networks. Is niche social networking a fad or will they continue to pop up as deploying social networks becomes easier and cheaper? Will these social networks ever get into the content-creation business, stepping into the space of legacy specialty and trade publications? Will the major social networks simply evolve as a place to aggregate a user’s online persona, with most of the collaboration taking place on niche sites? And should content producers (including news organizations) consider increasing the social nature of their sites to accommodate that interaction?

U.S. unique users, according to Wired magazine; that’s about one-fifth of the country’s population

a day for a “wallpaper advertisement” on the celebrity blogger’s website, according to a profile the Los Angeles Times