Did you know that Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is pulling in $60k a month from advertising on his blog? How about, Boing Boing? Did you know they’re on track to rake-in $1m this year?

Business 2.0 lifts the lid on how blogs are becoming big business and drawing in $40 million a year in advertising. A drop in the ocean, compared to other advertising mediums, but with online ad spending expected to increase by 50% in the next few years, and blogs become more popular, blog advertising spending is set for huge growth.

The article is lengthy but does a great job outlining where the money is going and which networks are doing well. John Battelle’s FM Publishing is included in the overview.

It looks like YouTube is taking its first steps towards offering ads at the popular video sharing site.

According to ClickZ, the first ads include a plug for the film “Pulse” and Paris Hilton promoting her new album (imagine that, a Paris Hilton video where she keeps her clothes on!)

The placements are part of a new set of ad products the company has developed to entice marketing partners. These aim to inject ads into the community lifeblood of the site rather than isolate them from it, and come in two flavors: Participatory Video Ads (PVAs) and Brand Channels.

YouTube is not straying from the formula that has helped its success. Viewers are able to rate and comments on Paris Hilton ads. Keeping the community involved is key, if YouTube expects them to tolerate advertising.

MarketWatch has details of a new Salesforce acquisition that will allow its customers to manage their Google AdWords accounts from the Salesforce console.

Salesforce obtained the technology for the service, called Salesforce for Google AdWords, by acquiring Kieden Corp., a tiny startup that quietly developed it using Salesforce’s AppExchange platform.

Customers can sign-up for a 30-day free trial and then pay $300 a month for the service. It’s kind of like doing your banking via a kiosk at a grocery store – sure it gets the job done, but you don’t get all the features and service you’d get from a bank branch – i.e. don’t trust your PPC management to anyone but a search marketing specialist!

Amit Agarwal has discovered that Google Talk’s new voicemail feature utilizes the Google Video player and can be hacked to play any MP3 of your choice.

…you can play any MP3 files from the embedded Google Video player without even having to login to GMail. Here’s the secret URL (works perfect in Firefox)

http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf?audioUrl=MP3_URL

Not sure why you’d won’t to uses such a basic player, but have at it!

Lots of buzz surrounding Microsofts new advertising deal with social networking site Facebook.

Late Tuesday evening, Microsoft announced that Facebook had agreed to allow the software company to provide search and advertising listings to Facebook’s 9 million users. The Wall Street Journal reported that the arrangement was for three years.

So where does this leave LookSmart? Jilted at the altar? They recently announced the same type of deal with Facebook and I met with CEO Dave Hills recently and he seemed very excited to have Facebook as an ad-partner.

So has LookSmart been dumped, or is there still room for them? I’ll email Dave Hills and let you know what he has to say.

Not much happening here Tuesday as I’m heading to New York to spend the day consulting with Jim Boykin and We Build Pages.

I’ll be back Wednesday.