This just in: Yell will acquire Spain’s Telefónica Publicidad e Información for US$3.9 billion. Here is a Bloomberg article with some details. We will cover this in more detail in an Advisory. This is a new direction for Yell, which had focused on its domestic market as well as its growth-engine U.S. property, Yellow …

Yahoo! and AT&T have extended their current relationship (Yahoo! exclusive content and an optimized My Yahoo! portal are offered to AT&T broadband customers) to now also offer integrated voice services. The voice-enabled Yahoo! messenger will be offered free to AT&T broadband subscribers including voice mail and missed-call retrieval. More analysis is deserved here (and it …

We’ve written about the concept of inserting advertisements in video games here. The Washington Post has a piece today about the current state of the art.
From the article:
While most online advertising revenue comes from banner ads or sponsored links that accompany search results, firms are focusing on adding more …

Washington Post Tech columnist Leslie Walker has an interesting piece today about search engine optimization. Worth a read.

Here is the press release detailing the winners of this year’s Yellow Pages Association Industry Excellence Awards. This year’s crop includes many very well-deserved honors, and we congratulate all the winners. It’s fair to say that the list of winners provides a useful digest of innovative ideas making the rounds in this …

Some news from the past couple of days:
—It’s official: McClatchy has found buyers for some of the big market papers it acquired with its recent purchase of Knight Ridder. MediaNews Group (Publisher of The Denver Post) and Hearst are the buyers. The deal is broken down futher in this AP article.
—After …

Yahoo! has launched a new local advertising search product called Featured Listings. You can see it here on the product page.
The advertising product is a fixed ad unit that is sold by position across all local categories. There are "North" positions above the fold and "South" positions below the fold. On each page …

are here.

We wrote about online video start-up DaveTV in last year’s White Paper "From Reach to Targeting: The Transfomation of Television in the Internet Age" (and here). Om Malik has a quick analysis of the company’s contextualized ad strategy for video channels (akin to AdSense) here.

It’s official: The Washington Post’s Express has launched its Web site, Readexpress.com. The site was already announced, but it is live for the first time today.
Express is a free daily metro aimed at commuters and younger readers that has a circulation of about 500,000. The new site is meant to be its online footprint …

Lots of interesting things have happened so far this week, mostly in the online video, social networking, and online news and classifieds spaces. Here is a quick recap:
—Many of the monetization challenges that face MySpace (analyzed in yesterday's post) also face video sharing site YouTube, as explored in this CNET …

The New York Times has a good piece on the monetization challenges and opportunities faced by MySpace. Though the site is second only to Yahoo! in the traffic it receives, its revenues are less than one-twentieth of Yahoo!'s.
From the article:
In buying MySpace, Mr. Murdoch also bought a tantalizing problem: how to tame a …

Here at the YPA convention, a panel discussion featuring independent Yellow Pages publishers unveiled one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry. There is a very early effort afoot to combine the three major North American industry trade associations into a single entity.
Each of the three associations — the YPA, the Association of Directory …

The Magic is Back, and don’t let anyone tell you different.
Here at the Yellow Pages Association’s annual confab, there is a general air of optimism about the industry. It’s sort of the same feeling people get when they anticipate a big storm, batten all the hatches, and when it is all said and done, there …

This writer shares a personal experience that convinced him at least that Craigslist was a more efficient way than Yellow Pages to locate a tradesperson to install his ceiling fan. It’s worth reading and absorbing.
The premise is that posting a request for bids, however informally, drives a better result than a …

The Google calendar product was launched about a week ago. Philipp Lenssen has posted a list of "interesting google calendars" with screen shots. It's worth the time to look at his list.

Here is a roundup of this week’s notable happenings from around the local media world:
—Job search engine Simply Hired raised $13.5 million in a third round of funding from Foundation Capital and Fox Interactive Media. It will use the funds for marketing, product development and international expansion.
—Yahoo! announced first-quarter earnings that included a …

This Red Herring article takes a hard look at the social networking space and asks whether we are in a bubble, what are sustainable advertising and revenue models, and will we see consolidation in the space soon?
The amount of VC money pouring into the space is one indication that the industry is becoming saturated, as …

A lot has been happenning this week in the online video space:
—AT&T announced yesterday that it will partner with IPTV content aggregator and platform provider Akimbo. The partnership will bring together Akimbo's movie and TV downloads and AT&T's Homezone television service. The latter will be served in conjunction with AT&T DSL service in California …

Saw this today in an AP report on Yahoo!’s 1Q earnings:
In a report released earlier this month, Merrill Lynch media analyst Lauren Rich Fine estimated spending on Internet ads this year will increase 27 percent to $14.5 billion, surpassing magazines and the Yellow Pages — both more established media markets. …