In This Update:
• Yahoo! Helps Women ”Shine” With New Website
• Cuba Lifts Curbs on Cellphone Use
• Reality Digital Secures $6.3 Million in Series B Funding
• AdMob Passes the 20 Billion Ads Served Mark
• AOL Launches Ad-Supported Mobile Gaming Channel
• News Aggregation Service Publish2 Gets $2.75 Million Funding
• ZenithOptimedia Upgrades Online Ad Spend To 23.4 Percent In ‘08
• Advertisers Expected To Spend $1.1 Billion For Local TV Online This Year

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Yahoo! Helps Women ”Shine” With New Website
FOX BUSINESS
Yahoo! Inc. today announced the launch of Yahoo! Shine (http://shine.yahoo.com), a new website for women that aims to provide the information most relevant to their daily lives. The site offers nine categories ranging from Fashion & Beauty to Parenting, and will feature content from many of the most popular lifestyles publishers, including Conde Nast Publications and Hearst Corporation. Additionally, a new editorial team will develop original stories on a daily basis, and hand pick the best user blog posts to feature prominently on the site. Yahoo! Shine creates a single destination for the approximately 40 million women between the ages of 25 and 54 who already come to Yahoo! each month, making Yahoo! a more relevant starting point for this audience.
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Cuba Lifts Curbs on Cellphone Use
WALL STREET JOURNAL
President Raul Castro’s government said it is allowing cellphones for ordinary Cubans, a luxury previously reserved for those who worked for foreign firms or held key posts with the communist-run state. It was the first official announcement of the lifting of a major restriction under the 76-year-old Mr. Castro, and marked the kind of small freedom many on the island have been hoping he would embrace since succeeding his older brother Fidel as president last month. Some Cubans previously ineligible for cellphones had already gotten them by having foreigners sign contracts in their names, but mobile phones are not nearly as common in Cuba as elsewhere in Latin America or the world.
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Reality Digital Secures $6.3 Million in Series B Funding
BUSINESS WIRE
Reality Digital, a leading provider of brand-focused social media solutions for businesses, today announced the closing of $6.3 million in its Series B round of venture funding from OpenView Venture Partners. OpenView Venture Partners’ Managing Partner and Senior Managing Director Scott Maxwell and Venture Partner Mark Barry, will join Reality Digital’s Board of Directors.
Reality Digital provides an on-demand platform that enables businesses to add cutting edge video sharing, social media and networking features, as well as business tools to their digital media initiatives. The company’s flagship product, the Reality Digital Opus^TM platform, applies a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model that can be rapidly launched as either a brand new Web environment, or within an existing Web domain to allow users to upload, manage and share digital video, audio and images online. Reality Digital provides companies with the opportunity to establish a dialog and foster a more intimate relationship with their customers. The approach improves brand awareness, user loyalty, customer retention and site “stickiness,” as well as positively affecting advertising revenues. Reality Digital customers include some of the leading players in media, publishing, and online entertainment, including MTV Networks, ITV Local and Lonely Planet.
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AdMob Passes the 20 Billion Ads Served Mark
TECHCRUNCH
San Mateo based mobile phone advertising provider AdMob has passed the 20 billion ads served mark. Since March 2007 the company’s monthly impressions have grown from 500 million ads per month to 2.5 billion advertisements per month today. AdMob’s 20 billionth ad impression was from financial services conglomerate HDFC. The ad was served in India at 1:56am GMT on Tuesday, March 25, while a visitor was browsing Cricinfo’s mobile web site on a Nokia N70.
We’ve covered AdMob a couple of times, but it’s a company doing some big numbers that we don’t hear that much about. Their client list is first rate: companies currently using AdMob include Porsche, Ford, Toyota, Adidas, CoverGirl, Herbal Essence, EA Sims, Terminix, TruGreen and Let’s Talk. Where it gets better (and why this is a company just waiting to be bought out) is two key clients: Google and Yahoo. The web’s two leading companies are using AdMob to advertise their services on mobile phones.
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AOL Launches Ad-Supported Mobile Gaming Channel
ADOTAS
AOL has somehow managed to leverage mobile games, interactive advertisements and social networking in one handy new community channel. AOL today announced that it is launching an ad-supported mobile gaming community channel, powered by Cellufun. The company will offer free mobile web-based games through its media portal – they are accessible on mobile web browsers and don’t require any downloads. Interactive advertising inventory will be sold by AOL’s Platform-A’s Third Screen Media and all of Cellufun’s top mobile Web titles like Call of the Pharaoh (which requires social networking to finish it), Space Wars and Ice Fishing will be available. “We’re thrilled to offer Cellufun’s catalog of popular games to our mobile users,” Steve Murphy, senior vice president, AOL, said in a statement. “Games are a great complement to the robust entertainment offerings available through the AOL mobile portal.”
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News Aggregation Service Publish2 Gets $2.75 Million Funding
PAIDCONTENT
Publish2, an as-yet unlaunched news aggregation service aimed for journalists and media companies, has received $2.75 million in its first round of funding from Velocity Interactive Group, the very-prolific VC firm which includes Jon Miller and Ross Levinsohn. The service is being described as “an online news aggregation platform, designed to empower the world’s journalists to discover, organize, and rank the most important news-to benefit their own reporting, their newsrooms, and all news consumers on the web.” It uses tools such as bookmarking, tags and commenting to help journalists aggregate and report on news. The new money will be used to complete the development of the platform and hiring. Not sure how different it is from other personal news aggregation tools out there, but this ons specifically focuses on professional journalists.
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ZenithOptimedia Upgrades Online Ad Spend To 23.4 Percent In ‘08
PAIDCONTENT
ZenithOptimedia expects online ad spending in the U.S. to grow 23.4 percent this year, an upgrade from the 19 percent it forecast in December. Overall, global ad spend for online will rise 26.5 percent this year to $47.7 billion, though individual figures for the U.S. were not broken out. The UK ad holding company attributed the revision upward in the U.S. to the continued shift from traditional media to interactive. And while the political ad spend has been minimal online so far, Zenith says that will change over the next few months, further contributing to a boost in internet revenues. But, with the absence of political marketers, Zenith has downgraded its 2009 forecast for online to 15.8 percent. And, as the law of large numbers dictates, things will slow down in 2010, with Zenith predicting internet ad growth of 12.3 percent. One positive trend: at the same time that growth rates are decreasing, online’s market share continues to rise to 9.7 percent of the total ad spend this year, 11.1 percent in ‘09 and 12.3 percent in ‘10.
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Advertisers Expected To Spend $1.1 Billion For Local TV Online This Year
PAIDCONTENT
Local TV stations are expected to make more than $1.1 billion for online advertising this year, up 45 percent over 2007, according to a report by Borrell Associates, which offers a similarly bright outlook for online TV and the local web spending in general. The report, conducted on behalf of Television Bureau of Advertising, a local station trade group, gathered data from 534 TV stations from Borrell’s database of 3,096 local web properties. While Borrell said local TV operators generated $772 million in internet sales 2007, for a growth rate of 72 percent over 2006, this year’s 45 percent slower growth is the result of the law of large numbers – a factor cited in the online space’s reduced growth rate overall. Still, considering most online advertising growth rates are well under the 30 percent highs of the past few years, local’s expected gains are still more than healthy. To put individual TV stations’ online revenue activity within the larger context of a local online ad surge, Borrell is forecasting total local ad growth of $13.01 billion by 2012, with $9.89 billion this year, compared to $7.63 billion in 2007 – a 29.6 percent increase.
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