Penney, Best Buy, Hyundai and the daily deals site LivingSocial.com began offering teaser views of their ads on company and social media sites.

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By upgrading its display ads offering, Microsoft may be able to increase not only the revenue per page view but also the total number of page views through which it serves display ads.

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The response has been staggering -- nearly 4 million page views, 12, 000 user-generated ads and a cascade of tweets.

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Disqus has run a rather surprising 5 billion ads a month on 1.5 billion page views, about a quarter of total Disqus page views.

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While the number of ads will naturally increase with increasing number of page views, the improvement in ad pricing is something that Facebook can leverage to better monetize its mobile platform.

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Freed Maxick, an accounting firm in northern New York state participating in Twitter's test, says the ads it bought on Twitter last fall targeting people looking for U.S. presidential candidates' views on taxes generated 2.1 million clicks on its website.

WSJ: Small Firms Say LinkedIn Works, Twitter Doesn't

Freed Maxick, an accounting firm in northern New York state participating in Twitter's test, says the ads it bought on Twitter last fall targeted people looking for U.S. presidential candidates' views on taxes generated 2.1 million clicks on its website.

WSJ: Small Firms Say LinkedIn Works, Twitter Doesn't