Cameron Yuill is the Founder and CEO of AdGent Digital.

Video advertising will double approximately every two years until all online ads will be video ads. That’s right — all online ads will be video.

I am calling this prediction “Cam’s Law” (after moi) with due respect and deep regard to Intel Founder Gordon E. Moore, who in 1965 predicted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years thereby exponentially increasing computing power.

Trust me, it does not take a genius to see the trends. My prediction is firmly guided by data. comScore’s recently reported that Americans watched 11.3 billion video ads in December, setting a new peak, and a sharp 10% rise from November’s 10.3 billion. December 2012 ad views were twice as many as in January 2012, representing 59% year-over-year growth. Video ads accounted for 22.6% of all videos viewed in December, and 1.9% of time spent viewing video online.

But That Was Last Year

Now three months into 2013, I feel ever more confident about Cam’s Law given the astronomical speed at which video advertising has grown in popularity. All signs point to the death of banner and static ads. Here’s why:

1. Consumers love video; not just cat MEMEs, but original content. And they watch a lot of video online. Nielsen says Americans spent more than 360 billion minutes online in December 2012 and streamed 24.6 billion videos.

2. Consumers watch video ads. After 60 years of television we have learned to watch the ads to get to the content. Yes, we know you want to get to your show, but often the ads are entertaining, visual and mercifully brief – and getting more interactive by the day.

3. Advertisers like video ads because consumers watch them. From August this year, market research company Nielsen will validate the astronomical shift to online video by including video viewed on tablet and mobile devices in their ratings measures. This will provide advertisers the data they need to shift their spend to online video in even greater numbers.

4. Consumers are buying (lots of) tablets. The global market for tablet computers surged 78.4 percent last year, according to research firm IDC, and sales are on schedule to pass PCs by 2017.

5. Tablets & smart phones make watching video easy in the bedroom, train, couch, park bench, and, ahem, bathroom.

6. Tablets make shopping easy and you can bet your last dollar that online retailers took notice last Thanksgiving and Christmas, so expect a monumental change in online sales strategies this year and increased consumer purchases via mobile and tablet.

7. If consumers are buying on their tablets, guess where advertisers will want to run their ads?

8. 4G will make watching video anywhere seamless. Did someone say “conversation killer?”

9. Banner ads do not work, but you already knew that.

Advertisers can’t ignore the numbers

As advertisers are beginning to embrace tablet advertising, in virtually every case they want video in their ad units. Consumers are watching those video ads hundreds of times more than they are clicking on banner ads.

While display and banner advertising were yesterday’s stepping stones for advertisers to enter the digital market, video is where the real action is.

Watch this space.

In 2014, we will review Cam’s Law to see where the market is; and we’ll do it via video because we know you will watch that. On your tablet.

Original TV image via Shutterstock

Cameron Yuill is the Founder and CEO of AdGent Digital, the company behind AdTouch™, a patent-pending HTML5 tablet ad platform for the creation, management and analysis of ad units on tablets for the mobile web.

Yahoo might see significant growth for the first time in years, with analysts predicting net ad revenues rising by 3.2 percent to a total of $3.28 billion for 2013.

Ad and marketing research firm eMarketer is also forecasting growth in Yahoo’s search marketing revenues: up by 7 percent to $1.23 billion for 2013.

When it comes to display ads, Yahoo has actually been posting negative numbers in years past. eMarketer expects that to turn around for the first time in 2013, with Yahoo posting one percent display revenue growth this year and increasing that growth to four percent by 2015.

Granted, the online and search ad market is growing at a greater rate than Yahoo’s gains, and companies like Google and Facebook are posting truly killer year-over-year numbers. All this means that while Yahoo’s bottom-line numbers will grow, its share of the domestic online ad market will decrease, shrinking to just 6.2 percent. For contrast, Google claims more than 72 percent of the total online ad spend in the United States.

But as eMarketer points out, 2012 was the first time in several years that Yahoo posted such revenue gains at all, and that trend continuing through 2013 is a very good sign.

“eMarketer … remains bullish about Yahoo!’s display business and expects growth in 2013 and 2014 as the company removes clutter and increases prices with higher-quality inventory,” a rep stated via email.

In terms of display ad revenue, eMarketer expects newcomers like Twitter to post dwindling returns while Yahoo makes a slow but steady comeback and Google continues to hold steady at around 35 percent growth year-over-year for the foreseeable future.

Other signs Yahoo is staging a comeback: a string of splashy acquisitions (the Dailymotion buyout, the Jybe acquihire, and then Summly) , a new data center and added jobs, and CEO Marissa Mayer’s zero-tolerance policy on WFH slackers, underperforming mobile apps, and cluttered homepages.

Overall, Yahoo’s stock price has gone up around 48 percent since Mayer took the CEO’s seat and is currently trading at $23.54:

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

When it comes to managing online ad campaigns, we could all use a hand — especially small businesses.

New York City-based Pricing Engine believes it has the solution. The company has been developing technology for simplifying online ads over the past two years, and today it’s finally coming out of beta testing with a platform for improving search marketing campaigns.

“Everybody has these problems [with ads], it’s not just money, it’s time,” said Pricing Engine chief executive Jeremy Kagan, who I ran into today during NYC’s Start conference. “There’s a big industry out there, and people are comfortable with trying to do digital ads — but they don’t have the time to manage it, or any reference point to make it better, so nobody is addressing the small businesses’ needs.”

The company’s platform has evolved significantly since it graduated from NYC’s Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator in 2011. The entire design is a lot more polished, and Pricing Engine has also implemented a grading system to make it easy to understand just how badly your ads are doing. The company’s platform can give you an estimated revenue benefit by raising your ads up to higher level, which could be a good motivator for some businesses.

Pricing Engine says it will expand its platform to include display media, social media ads, and e-commerce later in 2013.

The company is currently in the midst of raising its first round, Kagan divulged today. It’s aiming to raise $1.5 million, and it already has around $1.25 million committed. $1 million of that is from an anonymous, publicly traded strategic partner that resells Pricing Engine’s technology and deals with tens of thousands of small businesses.

“We’re looking for at least one good partner who can help us for our follow-up expansion, since we’re now switching our focus from vision to growth,” Kagan said.

As for what Pricing Engine will do with the funding, Kagan says it will put a lot of the money in the bank, but it’s also working on turning on existing partnerships.  The company also needs to invest time and money into integrating with APIs from other companies.

Online advertising, for one thing, was way up, with almost six trillion display ads published in 2012. That’s up 500 billion from 2011. Shockingly, AT&T accounted for a massive 1.04 billion of them, more than double the next largest online advertiser, Microsoft, which bought almost 50 billion impressions.

ComScore’s massive report also includes data on the top web properties, the battle for search dominance between Google and Bing, and smartphone market share, among other things.

Facebook, for instance, is the most popular app on phones in America, according to ComScore, showing up on 76 percent of phones. That’s impressive, but not as impressive as Google’s utter domination of the mobile charts. The search engine/social network/advertising giant has no less than five of the top six mobile apps in the U.S. Google’s apps such as Maps, Google Play, Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube take positions two through six.

In terms of top sites, Google retained leadership in terms of unique visitors, with over 191 million. That’s just six million more than Yahoo, which is still — perhaps surprisingly — strong in online services and information, and over 20 million more than Microsoft.

But Facebook takes the cake in terms of time share: almost 11 percent of all time spent online, is spent on Facebook.

Here’s a visual selection of the report’s findings:

Image credits: ComScore

On that earnings call, CEO Larry Page said he was “very, very optimistic” that Google’s mobile revenues would be going up, that Google was “working to simplify our ad system,” and that, although he didn’t have anything to announce immediately, the company was making “rapid progress in that area.”

Now we know at least part of what he was talking about.

Source: WordStream

The old way of adding mobile devices, all of which is going away

Today Google very quietly announced new AdWords API features supporting “enhanced campaigns.” By ‘enhanced,’ Google means mobile. And despite the quiet launch, it’s the biggest change to AdWords in the last five years, according to one key member of the online advertising ecosystem.

“This is a huge simplification to how advertisers manage and track mobile advertising campaigns,” Larry Kim, CEO of search marketing firm WordStream, told me today.

The problem in the past was that AdWords was desktop-centric. Building a successful mobile marketing in the past essentially forced advertisers to create multiple campaigns if they wanted to target different cities and devices effectively, massively increasing complexity to the point that only about 5 percent of AdWords users were actually using the services’ advanced features.

The key difference today is that mobile is now baked in by default.

With the update, Google is adding the ability to simply and quickly set up geo-targeted advertising campaigns via new bid adjustment features: spend more close to your locations, spend increasingly less in farther and farther locations. In addition, mobile devices can be easily be managed in the same campaign that targets desktop searchers, with an option that very simply and easily increments or decrements your standard ad price.

“They’ve re-thought the whole way of setting up campaigns,” Kim says. “Now, you just have one campaign, and in that campaign you can bid differently depending on whether the person is on mobile or desktop. You can use the ‘mobile bid multiplier’ to, for example, bid 50 percent of your desktop bid, or 125 percent of your desktop bid.”

To turn off mobile, advertisers will have to turn the bid multiplier for mobile devices to -100 percent … effectively shutting it down. On the positive side, the multiplier can be turned up to 300 percent of your desktop bid for high-value keywords in the right location at the right time.

Google says it’s done this because now “instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions … [advertisers] can easily manage all of this in one single place.”

The new features, Kim says, address the two biggest stumbling blocks that small businesses and startups have with AdWords: it has not been easy to create successful campaigns, and the conversion and reporting tools have not made it super-easy to see return on investment.

“I think they’re the two biggest hurdles in mobile advertising adoption, and this means a lot more advertisers will adopt Google AdWords,” Kim told me. “Now you don’t have to be a full-time search marketer to do this anymore … and you’ll see more ROI from mobile searches.”

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

Ziff Davis, owner of popular media properties like PCMag and Geek.com, has been purchased by cloud service company J2 Global for $167 million, the companies announced today.

The all-cash deal will lead to an increase in the J2′s estimated 2012 revenues of $345 million to $365 million, the company said. It will also add $60 million to J2′s 2013 revenues.

J2 offers a variety of cloud-based communication services, including the online faxing company eFax, and backup service KeepItSafe. While the deal obviously gives J2 a leg up in digital media, it’ll be interesting to see what it means for Ziff Davis.

Like many media companies, Ziff Davis has faced a bumpy road over the past few years.  In 2008, the firm filed for bankruptcy protection and ceased production of the print version of PCMag. It was then acquired by the private equity firm Great Hill Partners in 2010. Details of that deal weren’t disclosed, but it was thought to be under $150 million at the time. Vivek Shaw, a former Time Warner media executive, also assumed the chief executive role at ZD at that point.

In addition to media properties, Ziff Davis also owns BuyerBase, a data-driven ad targeting platform. The combination of such a platform with popular web properties could make this deal worthwhile for J2, which is also dabbling in online ads.

“We have years of experience and significant interest in the digital media and online marketing space, both as a large scale consumer of advertising (~$50M per year) and as a seller of advertising on our ad supported properties (e.g. eFax Free) and a provider of marketing and advertising services through Campaigner,” said J2 chief executive officer Hemi Zucker in a statement today. “This acquisition brings scale to this effort with a top leadership team deeply committed to building the business through organic growth, which we expect to continue. This is our 40th acquisition and we plan to grow the business in the same way we have our others – through a combination of internal growth and acquisitions.”

There’s good news for people who like free content and services online. And even better news for web publishers, search engines, and social sites who want to provide that content and services.

Internet ad revenues are up 14 percent in the first six months of 2012, hitting a new record $17 billion. And that 14 percent increase is dwarfed by mobile’s nearly doubling — a 95 percent increase — to hit $1.2 billion.

In addition, digital video ad revenue grew by 18 percent to just over $1 billion while search revenues for the first quarter were up 19 percent to $8.1 billion, and display ad revenue was up just four percent to $5.6 billion.

Those numbers were released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an advertising industry organization which has recently come under fire for opposing “do not track” technology that allows consumers to opt out of online tracking.

The growth in mobile is particularly interesting.

While certainly increasing from a smaller base, the near-doubling shows that mobile site and app revenue models depending on advertising are just starting to hit their stride. According to IAB numbers, the first few years of digital advertising from 1996 to 2000 showed triple-digit increases ranging from 110 percent to 320 percent annually, and if the pattern continues, mobile ad revenue has a long runway for growth.

Another interesting set of numbers focus on the type of publisher revenue model. Performance-based advertising, such as pay-per-click, has grown from 64 percent of advertising revenue in 2011 to 67 percent in 2012. Impression-based advertising, such as banners ads which are paid on a per-thousand-impressions basis, remained steady at 31 percent, while hybrid models decreased to only two percent.

“Solid double-digit growth in a stagnating economy is a significant accomplishment,” Sherrill Mane, and IAB vice-president, said in a statement. “There is evidence that CPMs are maintaining, and even increasing, further substantiating the vitality of the internet ad market.”

That’s good news for internet publishers — yes, that includes VentureBeat — and it’s good news for consumers who want free content and services.

Source: IAB

Internet ad revenues by year since 1996

Image credit: Million-dollar homepage

At VentureBeat, we come across a lot of funding news every day. In order to bring you the most information possible, we’re rounding up the quick-and-dirty details about the funding deals of the day and serving them up here in our “Funding daily” column.

Square may be raising a new round at $4B valuation

Mobile payment startup Square is said to be raising a new round of funding that would value the company at a whopping $4 billion. Square has already raised $137 million Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital, and Khosla Ventures, among others.

Eucalyptus secures $30M investment

Open-source cloud software maker Eucalyptus Systems has raised $30 million in its third round of funding. The company offers an open-source software platform for private and hybrid clouds. Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), led the round, with Benchmark Capital, BV Capital, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) participating.

AdSafe gets funding to keep your ads off porn sites

AdSafe Media has raised $10 million in funding to make sure your company’s ads don’t intentionally wind up in potentially embarrassing places such as porn or pirating sites. Pelion Venture Partners, Atlas Venture, and Coriolis Ventures participated in the round.

Coursera goes back to school with $16M

Shaking up online education and bringing university courses to anyone with an Internet connection, Coursera grabbed a $16 million investment. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was the venture firm behind the investment.

Cyphort raises $7M

Stealthy Cyphort filed a form D Wednesday for what appears to be a new $7 million funding round. The company fights cyber threats for government agencies and business with software.

CircleUp grabs money for crowdfunding

CircleUp has raised $1.5 million from David Topper and other investors. The company launched its service today, which helps startups get funding from wealthy investors —  those that make over $200,000 in yearly income or have a net worth of more than $1 million. Instead of focusing on tech startups, CircleUp helps investors give capital to consumer product companies.

TransferWise gets funding to shake up currency exchanges

TransferWise closed $1.3 million in funding for its scheme to sidestep the banks using cheap, peer-to-peer currency exchange. Among the new investors is Max Levchin, the co-founder of PayPal.

SkySQL raises $4M

SkySQL has raised $4 million in first-round funding. SkySQL consults with businesses to set them up with MySQL and MariaDB database services. OnCorps led the round with Finnish Industry Investment Ltd., Spintop Ventures and Open Ocean Capital. The full release is below.

Boxing image via Flickr user djclear904

The new ad platform, dubbed Style as a Service, is a joint venture between StyleCaster and ad space monitoring and brokering service MediaMath and seeks to help fashion, beauty and consumer brands with ad advice and placement. MediaMath gives access to the inventory of publishers like Rodale and the New York Times, while StyleCaster uses its knowledge of branding to act as an advisor for where to place the ads.

“With Style as a Service, brands no longer have to sacrifice scale for highly-integrated, strategic media buys,” David Goldberg, president and co-founder of StyleCaster, told VentureBeat via e-mail. “We can give them both, using MediaMath as the pipeline to inventory across any publishing platform and property layered with proprietary user data for rich targeting.”

StyleCaster has done alpha testing on Style as a Service throughout 2011 with various fashion and beauty brands. One campaign StyleCaster likes to point to that shows off its expertise is the Diet Coke “Stay Extraordinary” campaign. The company also has worked with H&M on branded editorial content for the 2011 holiday season.

At present, StyleCaster.com and its sister site, BeautyHigh.com, attract more than 2 million unique visitors per month. Style as a Service will use user data from the StyleCaster network to find out which publishing properties will be most effective for the brand’s target audience.

“What makes SaaS unique is that we utilize our proprietary data to determine what inventory is most valuable to our brand partners and project which marketing assets spark more consumer engagement, all within an environment that is 100% brand safe,” Goldberg said.

The Style as a Service platform will compete with Condé Nast’s newly launched private ad exchange, which is powered by Google’s Admeld. Goldberg said StyleCaster’s solution is superior because it offers user data to better inform where ads should be placed.

New York-based StyleCaster was founded in 2009 and has raised a total of $5.5 million in funding. Its latest funding round came from the likes of Zynga chief mobile officer David Ko and former MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta.

Facebook (and just about every other free Web service) has built a business on that saying and its implications, and the European Commission is taking the social network to task for it. The EU is considering a ban on Facebook’s practice of selling demographic data to marketers and advertisers without specific permission from users.

First, let’s have a primer on how Facebook makes money: The company gets you to willingly enter all kinds of demographic and behavioral information into a massive database. Advertisers, big brands and Facebook’s sales team call it “data.” You call it your profile, your likes, your check-ins, your comments and everything else you do on the site.

Facebook then uses that data — in an aggregated, anonymized form, of course — to sell media space to brands and advertising agencies. The data lets them know exactly how, when, where and to whom to market their wares for maximum effectiveness. It also means you’re less likely to see a completely irrelevant-to-you advertisement on the social network.

Now, however, the EC is planning to ban such activity unless users themselves specifically agree to it. The EU’s data protection working group is currently investigating how Facebook tracks users, stores data and uses that information to serve targeted ads. The ban may take effect as soon as next year.

While agreements to personal data usage are present in the current Facebook Terms of Service, few of us actually read those terms before we agree and use the site.

“Facebook should ensure that any data it collects should be used in the manner that its users expect,” the UK Information Commissioner told reporters. “If personal data is being passed on to a third party or used for targeted advertising, then this should be made clear to the user when they sign up to the site and reinforced when users are invited to use an application.”

However, Facebook maintains that users prefer seeing ads that are linked to their interests and lifestyles. Also, the company reminds us that private information stays private, even when data is used to sell ads, because information is collected in aggregate and is anonymized.

Facebook is on track for $4.27 billion in revenue this year, largely due to its wildly successful ad platform. The company also has a full 16.3 percent of the overall share of U.S. online display ad revenue.

Image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell.

Intergi Entertainment

Bigpoint has more than 200 million registered users for its 60 online games, which include titles such as Battlestar Galactica Online, DarkOrbit, Seafight, and Farmerama.

Bigpoint has been making a push into the U.S. for the past 18 months and is tapping Intergi to provide online ad services. Heiko Hubertz, chief executive of Bigpoint, said that, just as Bigpoint tries to make top-notch games, its advertising has to be top notch as well.

Many of Bigpoint’s games are free to play, where users play for free but pay real money for virtual goods. But the games can be monetized via ads as well, and Deerfield Beach, Fla.-based Intergi will find the advertisers who want to place ads next to Bigpoint’s online games.

Over the past three years, Intergi has seen revenue growth of 2,383 percent. The company, headed by CEO Jayson Dubin, CEO, creates custom, site-specific, or channel-wide opportunities for advertisers across entertainment and gaming properties. It has 20 employees and was formed in 2007. Rivals include IGN and GameSpot.

As one of its services, Intergi has a video publishing platform called Playwire that makes it easy for sites to make money from video advertising.

Intergi uses video, mobile, flash and interactive elements to build ad campaigns and provides real-time analytics to manage and track the results.

Investors include angel funding from Jayson Dubin, Steven Berger, Ken Greiner, Bruce Gellar and Jonathan Petak. Intergi now has more than 40 exclusive partnerships with firms such as Major League Gaming.

This is great news, right? A solid rebound!

Well, sort of. The economy kicked into gear, advertisers got their budgets back, and they needed to spend it somewhere. And where did they put it? Online, of course. Not only are people spending more time online, the advertisers also saw excess online inventory being pumped out by the publishers, and they took advantage by buying it at bargain rates.

In other words, advertisers are buying more ads, but there’s so much inventory that it’s depressing rates.

EMarketer principal analyst David Hallerman says his firm doesn’t officially track market ad rates (CPMs, or cost per a thousand impressions) and doesn’t know anyone who does it well. So he bases his assessment of CPM trends on anecdotal information, such as interviews with publishers and other market vendors. He says it’s clear that growth of overall ad impressions is faster than the growth of banner ad spending.

In other words, Hallerman says, “Pricing has come down.” CPMs for banner ads can be as low as $1, “and that’s with targeting on top. … You don’t see run of network ads as much,” he says.

In general, smaller sites will be hurt more by lower pricing than bigger or more focused sites, which are better able to command higher CPMs, he said. He listed the WSJ, the New York Times and VentureBeat as examples of bigger, higher-CPM sites.

But overall, it means most publishers are having to pump out more page views just to stay in place.

The other notable development: For the first time, display ad spending is within striking distance of search advertising spending. Even though search will continue to grow strongly over the next five years, eMarketer estimates display ad revenue will surpass search revenue within that period (see graphic). Banner ads, sponsorships, and video ads are all growing even faster than search.

And finally, a note on mobile ads: The number of advertisers using mobile display ad campaigns has more than doubled in the past two years, according to a separate report released today by Comscore. It said mobile content and publishing account for half of all products advertised on mobile devices.

Still, mobile dollars make up an extraordinarily small portion of the overall ad pie. As of last year, it was between 2.1 to 2.5 percent of total online ad spending, according to eMarketer’s Hallerman, citing industry stats. As a result, mobile ads won’t be a major factor in growth of the overall market for the next year or two, he concludes.

Adxpose helps advertisers and publishers gain more control of their online ads. For advertisers, the tool tracks specifics like where ads land and how users interact with them. The tool also gives content publishers control over things like placement, reporting and protection from fraud.

The company also announced several changes to its leadership, including former president and chief revenue officer Kirby Winfield to chief executive, and former senior vice president of strategic development Ryan Polley to chief operator. Winfield will also join the company’s board of directors.

Several competitors offer similar services, including DoubleVerify and Adsafe Media.

The Seattle-based company, founded in 2005, claims to have had a good 2010 with a 150% quarter-by-quarter increase in revenue and impressions optimized, according to a company announcement.

The latest round of funding was led by previous investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson and included Ignition Partners.

The San Francisco startup is launching a new feature called the “R1 Like Button,” which brings the “like” button that Facebook popularized into the world of advertising. If advertisers choose to include it, viewers will be able to both like and share an ad. When viewers like an ad, they’re giving RadiumOne data about what ads are relevant or interesting to them, and the network can hopefully deliver better-suited ads in the future.

The share option, meanwhile, allows viewers to share an ad on Facebook, Twitter, email, or elsewhere. After all, ads can include useful or at least entertaining content, so the share button creates an easy way to help them spread virally. And presumably, sharing provides another source of data about viewer preferences.

The idea of asking for user feedback on ads seems to be on the rise. Perhaps the most prominent example is video site Hulu, which asks, “Is this ad relevant to you?” during each commercial. But RadiumOne said it’s the first ad network to include this feature. And there are early signs that this is useful data, with shared ads seeing a 28 percent higher conversion rate (i.e., it’s 28 percent more likely that a viewer will actually click on the ad) than unshared ones. RadiumOne also said 32 percent of viewers who “liked” an ad visited the advertiser’s web page within five days.

RadiumOne is the re-branded version of gWallet, an offer startup that raised a $12.5 million round led by Adams Street Partners and Trinity Ventures.

You can watch a demo video of the like button here. For another example of how advertisers are creating new ways for viewers to interact and offer feedback on ads, you can also check out AdKeeper’s “keepable” ads.

Advertising agencies use DSPs to centralize all their ad-buying across multiple ad exchanges and networks, usually with some degree of automated bidding and audience targeting. Not only are DSPs managing a big portion of online ad spending, but they’re reportedly a major factor behind the display advertising growth Google has seen.

When Turn launched its platform back in 2008, it emphasized the flexibility that it offers advertisers. When I asked the company via email how it stands out from the DSP crowd today, president and chief executive Bill Demas pointed to the high return on investment it offers advertisers, the breadth of its platform, and its transparency. He wrote:

As a Silicon Valley-based company, we offer a seamless, end-to-end integrated solution – in other words, we put the ‘P” in DSP. As a platform company, this comprises three areas: (1) an enterprise-class technology infrastructure for real-time bidding; (2) an algorithmically optimized data and media platform: it’s about the algorithms and not manual tricks; (3) intuitive self-service software empowering marketers to run their own campaigns.

Demas didn’t offer any specific details about Turn’s success so far, except to say that the company has consistently doubled its revenue every year.

Greenberg Associates led the current round, and all of Turn’s previous investors (Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital, Shasta Ventures and Focus Ventures) also participated. The Redwood City, Calif.-headquartered company has now raised $57 million.

The round brings New York-based AdKeeper’s total funding to $43 million. That’s an impressive sum for a Web startup that hasn’t even launched its first product yet. (It’s currently in private testing, with plans for a full launch early this year.) But the company has a unique and compelling idea — that we see many online ads at the wrong time, when we’re not interested in clicking a link or don’t have time to fill out a registration form. With AdKeeper, ads will have a “keep” button embedded in them, which users can click to save interesting ads for browsing later.

The company says it has enlisted “the largest group of charter advertisers for any new media launch, ever,” including Allstate, Ally Bank, AT&T, Best Buy, CBS, Ford, Gap, General Mills, InterContinental Hotels Group, JetBlue, Kia Motors, Kmart, Kraft Foods, Macy’s, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Sara Lee, Sears, Showtime, The Advertising Council, The Home Depot, Unilever, and Warner Bros.

Chief executive Scott Kurnit’s background and connections are probably attractive for investors, too. He founded the company that became About.com, and when I interviewed him in December, he offered an ambitious vision for how AdKeeper might transform the way we measure advertising, where the amount of times an ad has been “kept” might become as important to advertisers as views and clicks.

The new funding was led by Oak Investment Partners. Previous investors DCM, True Ventures, Spark Capital, and First Round Capital also contributed to the round.

U.S. spending on online ads will hit $25.8 billion in 2010, compared with $22.8 billion spent on print ads in newspapers, the Wall Street Journal reported. This change has been a long time coming, since consumers have moved to the internet in large numbers and newspaper readers have stopped subscriptions as the papers get thinner and thinner.

It reminds me of 2008, when I left the newspaper business after nearly 20 years to join VentureBeat. Back then, there was a lot of hand-wringing about the fate of newspapers. Times were heady for tech blogs and other online news sites. Then the recession hit and made everyone in the media gloomy.

Ad spending in the U.S. is expected to rise 3 percent to $168.5 billion, eMarketer said. But spending on print ads in newspapers will decline 8.2 percent in 2010 and the forecast is for another decline of 6 percent for newspapers in 2011. At least newspapers seem to have stabilized from the huge drops they saw from 2006 to 2009, as you can see from the chart.

“It’s something we’ve seen coming for a long time, but this is a tipping point,” says Geoff Ramsey, the chief executive of eMarketer, in an interview with the Journal.

Online ads don’t command the same kind of rates that newspapers do. But they make it up in volume, as there are so many more online publications. Forrester Research also reports that consumers spend as much time online as they do watching TV. The extra time spent online is coming at the expense of reading newspapers, browsing magazines and listening to the radio.

[photo credit: Gawker]

The research firm estimated online ad spending in the U.S., projected at $25.8 billion for 2010, will grow to $28.5 billion by next year, $32.6 billion by 2012, $36 billion by 2013, and $40.5 billion by 2014. The projections were calculated by performing a meta-analysis of research estimates by firms tracking ad spending.

The dramatic rise over the next few years, the firm predicts, is due to the fact that even as the economy takes an upward trajectory, big-brand marketers are likely to continue a shift to Internet advertising over older forms, increasingly acknowledging it as the dominant platform for U.S. consumers to spend most of their time and consume content.

Now that the average YouTube viewer is consuming close to 4.5 hours of video every month on the site, Google is finally beginning to reap its dues from its $1.65 billion buyout four years ago. And this aggressive push to increase monetization on the site will lead many more advertisers to join the online video-advertising bandwagon. The format is predicted to remain the fastest-growing of all through 2014.

Meanwhile, search advertising is still leading in terms of actual dollars: As Google’s main source of revenue, ads on Google’s own properties bought in $4.8 billion in the last quarter.

But it’s spending on social networks, the current buzz of the town, which has some catching up to do. Hitting around $2 billion this year, ad spending on social networks still makes for a measly 6 percent of total online ad spending. Marketers may talk about their social media strategy and create Facebook pages and Twitter profiles for their brands, but it seems most of that is yet to be converted into real advertising dollars by its major players.

That may change, largely thanks to Facebook, whose audience of 500 million-plus users is large enough to be attractive to brand advertisers. The company is now ramping up its selling efforts, including rumored plans to lease a large office directly on Madison Avenue to house a growing army of salespeople.

But Internet-advertising pioneer Dave Morgan, who cofounded 24/7 RealMedia and Tacoda, argued Friday morning that television viewing is growing, as is television advertising — and that TV ads may be “wildly underpriced.”

“Most of you won’t admit that you watch four to five hours of television a day,” said Morgan.

His latest venture, Simulmedia, which launched last year and drew an investment from cable-TV giant Time Warner in April, aims to bring techniques of Web targeting to television to boost prices from their current levels.

Today, TV ads are mostly sold based on crude gender and age demographics. Internet ads, by contrast, are increasingly targeted with sophisticated algorithms based on a host of data points about individual and group behavior.

“Clearly there’s an opportunity” to apply those techniques to TV ads, said Morgan. “Untargeted TV ads for the promotion of TV or movies work at a level of 3 to 4 percent. Why do movie companies advertise on TV? You can track TV exposure on an individual, neighborhood, household level to sales.”

Data-based targeting lifted results by 75 percent over sex-and-age demographics, said Morgan, based on recent campaigns Simulmedia has run.

“A half to two-thirds of television advertising is dramatically underpriced,” said Morgan.

The question Morgan left unanswered: Will television companies be able to capture those improved results in higher advertising rates? Or will advertisers simply expect a better return from the dollars they’re currently spending?

“There’s a million ways to make money with Twitter,” he said. “We’ll probably try a few more.”

Williams did talk a bit more about Twitter’s ad products, saying that the company’s concern right now is that demand from advertisers far exceeds supply, which is why the company is building out its sales team. Like Costolo, Williams emphasized that Twitter ads start out as regular content and stop running if they’re not getting much response from users.

John Battelle, who was interviewing Williams on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit, said he’s heard that Twitter’s Promoted Trend ads cost between $80,000 and $100,000 but Williams didn’t comment on specifics. (No surprise.) On the question of total advertising revenue, he said, “I haven’t done the math.”

There do seem to be revenue streams that Twitter isn’t interested in. The company is testing an analytics service and apparently doesn’t plan to charge for it. Although Twitter has sold access to its its firehose of data in the past, Williams said Twitter made those deals because the team thought increasing distribution of its data was a good thing.

“The point of those deals was never primarily about revenue,” he said.

That doesn’t mean reselling data couldn’t become source of money. Gnip today announced a deal with Twitter to resell access to the firehose.

Williams also discussed his decision to step down as Twitter’s CEO, which I covered in a separate post.

[photo by Dean Takahashi]

The service launched its beta test almost exactly three years ago, so while the service is relatively early, Kilar said, this seems like a good time to assess the progress it has made already. Especially since GigaOm, the tech news site hosting the NewTeeVee Live conference where Kilar was speaking, had originally predicted that Hulu was doomed to failure.

So here are the Hulu statistics Kilar shared:

• 30 million monthly users
• 260 million content streams (each TV episode is counted as a content stream)
• 800 million ad streams
• 352 ad partners
• On-track to earn more than $240 million in revenue in 2010 (compared to $25 million in 2008 and $108 million in 2009)

That’s still tiny compared to the total audience and money in the traditional and cable TV industries. And Hulu probably shares a large amount of that revenue with its content partners. Still, as an indicator that Internet TV could be a big business, it’s pretty promising. After Kilar’s talk, GigaOm’s Om Malik suggested that if the company continues that kind of revenue growth next year, it could be on-track for the rumored initial public offering. Naturally, Kilar declined to comment.

Here’s a post on some other comments Kilar made today about advertising on Hulu.