Display Impressions down, RSS clicks Up, HBO over Cingular and... Howard Stern? Our editor at large reviews the week's happenings.

As we head into the New Year and spend more and more time talking about emerging interactive ad platforms, innovative technologies, and -- my personal favorite -- thinking outside the box, let's take one last look inside the box. Online display advertising may not be sexy most of the time, but it is, after all, where the majority of advertisers spend their time and money. Buying impressions, counting them, debating what counts and what doesn't at great lengths, then buying some more.

Well, Nielsen//NetRatings' AdRelevance reports that display impressions in November actually dropped seven percent, compared with October, to total 115.3 billion. That's still more than were served in previous months (March through September), but a notable drop nonetheless.

Not surprisingly, impressions via email sites accounted for 26.7 percent of impressions in November, up from 20.8 percent from the same month last year. Yahoo! Mail has unseated MSN Hotmail (least year's leader) to take the top spot with the largest share of ads -- 16.7 percent. (AdRelevance doesn't include in the data ads served on proprietary America Online pages, accessed only by AOL subscribers, only counting ads that appear on AOL pages accessed via the Web.)

AdRelevance reports that portals and search engine ad impression counts are also down slightly from year to 12.3 percent from 15.5 percent. General community sites, on the other hand, attracted 11.5 percent of impressions, up from just 4.8 percent in November of 2004.

Finally, AdRelevance says that financial services are still the heaviest online marketers, accounting for 20 percent of impressions last month.

Where did all those impressions go? Some of them went to RSS, apparently. Pheedo, a San Francisco-based RSS advertising company, this week released data showing that RSS ads garner a 3.2 percent to eight percent clickthrough rate, compared to an industry average of below one percent for banner advertising. Keeping in mind the source and the fact that CTRs are so very last year,

Pheedo reports that standalone RSS ads, where the entire post is the advertisement, generate a 7.99 percent clickthrough rate, on average, which is nearly nine times more clicks than an inline RSS ad (an advertisement within a publisher's post).

Additionally, Pheedo says that placing RSS ads in every other post yields the highest percentage of clickthroughs. Their data show that when ads are placed in every other feed post, users clicked on the ad 3.24 percent of the time. When ads were placed in every post in a feed, that number dropped to 1.04 percent. Pheedo also found that placing one ad to every six posts is also a highly effective ratio, resulting in a 1.64 percent CTR.

Interestingly enough, Pheedo found that RSS readership rises steadily at the beginning of the week, peaking on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then declines through the weekend. Average weekend readership is 67 percent lower than average weekday readership.

But enough about that. Following last week's announcement of CBS webcasting NCAA games, HBO said this week that they're going to offer mobile programming through Cingular Wireless. Cingular Video, an on-demand streaming video service, will offer personalized access to high-quality video clips on high-speed capable (3G) phones. Cingular Video will also let consumers personalize their service so they can access current video content they want to see, including news, sports, weather and entertainment clips. HBO will produce exclusive mobile content on the two new services -- HBO Mobile and HBO Family Mobile -- offering select episodes and clips of HBO shows, cartoons and never-before-seen comedy and sports.

Incidentally, according to the latest eMarketer report, next year, 3 million U.S. consumers will watch TV shows on their cell phones and, by 2009, that number will balloon to 15 million. Mobile video ad revenues probably will reach $25 million to $50 million in several years, eMarketer predicts.

Speaking of running video on small screens, Yahoo! has announced that it will pick up Howard Stern from his studio in a Yahoo!-branded double-decker bus today after the airing of his last show on terrestrial radio and drive him over to the Hard Rock Café for a party, webcasting the whole thing live. (Just in case you were looking for something to do tonight.)

And one last thing about online video. WebMD this week launched a new video section that offers fresh streaming content daily. The company said AstraZeneca will be sponsoring some of the clips with a 60-second pre-roll ad. (So much for the IAB recommendation that pre-roll video ads not exceed 30 seconds.)

All of this is certainly good news for advertisers who have been clamoring for more online ad video inventory.

And one final bit of good news, albeit apropos of nothing: Michelin North America is reportedly increasing its online advertising spending for car and truck tires up to 10 percent next year, even as its overall marketing budget remains flat compared to 2005.

I wonder how much of that will go to mobile and online video?

iMedia Connection Editor at Large Masha Geller is the founder of interactive marketing and corporate communications consultancy Geller Public Relations in New York. She has been covering the interactive advertising industry since 1999 as the former editor in chief of MediaPost.com, and is a widely-published thought leader in the interactive arena.