Ad Revenues Climb Says IAB; Tribune’s New Metadata

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Record Highs For Ad Revenue

While you/we were away, a report from the IAB and Pricewaterhouse Coopers revealed that Q3 Internet ad revenues hit a high of $10.69 billion. “These figures reflect marketers’ trust in interactive to deliver,” said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of IAB. “It is indicative of the digital age in which we live, and within which advertisers need to effectively reach targeted audiences wherever they are consuming information or entertainment — often on several screens at once.” Read the release.

In The Metadata

Sony is selling its Gracenote business to Tribune Co. for $170 million, according to Bloomberg, as it tries to streamline its business. The software is mainly used by companies like Apple and Amazon as a recognition service, but could be used to serve targeted ads on TVs. “Together we will become an even greater force in the global entertainment data business,” Shashi Seth, president of Tribune Digital Ventures, said in the statement. Read more on Bloomberg. And read the release.

China Deal

Apple has finally made a deal with the largest Chinese mobile carrier, China Mobile, that could potentially bring millions of new customers to the tech company. The Next Web reported that there could be some overhyping going on, though, as there are other networks in the country that carry iPhones. Add to that a high sticker price and it could be that Apple doesn’t scoop up quite as many users as it hoped. Read more.

Funding Answers

Answers.com is on an upswing, raising $300 million and acquiring customer experience analytics company ForeSee, according to TechCrunch. The site relies on subscriptions for half of its revenue. The company hopes that by providing its Q&A service on other sites it can build a more dynamic platform as similar sites, such as Yahoo Answers, continue to lose popularity. Read more.

Publishers’ Hall Of Shame

Publishers who use aggressive advertising tactics will be outed, or so finds Digiday’s John McDermott, who rounded up several blogs that do just that. The blogs that McDermott highlights include Crapshaming, WTF Mobile Web and more. Stuffing your site with ads at the cost of the user experience tells readers “that the publisher simply places more value on being liked on Facebook than they do on their own content. This seems like a pretty good indicator to me that I’m not going to value the content on there either,” Andy Beaumont, a self-proclaimed “angry adman“ and creative technology director at Albion London, tells McDermott. Read more.