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Over 97% of all searches on real-time search engine and infrastructure provider OneRiot are now driven by the company's partners who use OneRiot's API to serve real-time search results. Today, OneRiot is announcing the next version of its API, which - among other things - gives content owners the ability to create real-time search engines for their domains and sites. The new API will also allow developers to integrate OneRiot's real-time ads with the search results. OneRiot is also introducing a new ad format for Twitter apps. These ads are limited to 140 characters and include shortened URLs.

You can get paid to tweet. Average, non-celebrity users are making some decent pocket change using Twitter ad services like Twittad, Magpie, Sponsored Tweets, and Ad.ly. And while reports of $10,000 tweets abound, average users are pulling in much smaller amounts, usually three figures at most.

But aren't these programs rewarding scam artists who boost their follower count through artificial means or sneak in ads that look like regular tweets? Surprisingly, for the most part, the answer is no.

This is part 2 of a two part series on paid tweets. See part 1 here.

Here's a little secret about Twitter that you may not know: some people are getting paid to tweet. We don't mean it's their job to Twitter as the PR front-end for some large corporation, either. They're actually getting paid to post advertisements to their Twitter stream. When their followers click though, the end result is cold, hard cash.

The Twitter ad industry, an experimental playground where new ideas about making money on the Internet flourish, is made up of a handful of companies who work with advertisers to run in-stream Twitter campaigns. Surprisingly, it's not as unseemly as it sounds. For the most part, tweets are disclosed, backlash is minimal and the so-called "publishers" - the Twitterers, that is - are making a decent bit of pocket change. Just don't count on banking 10K per tweet like Kim Kardashian allegedly did.

OneRiot, one of the leading real-time search engines, just announced the launch of a new advertising product for real-time apps. RiotWise Trending Ads will give OneRiot's partners a feed of ads related to currently trending topics on the Web. These ads can, for example, be integrated in a user's stream of updates in Twitter apps or displayed as regular mobile ad units. Digsby, for example, plans to place these ads directly in its users' streams, but because the units are delivered as a feed through OneRiot's API, developers are free to use them in whatever way they see fit.

Digg CEO Jay Adelson told FOX Business tonight that ever since rolling out Digg Ads, the social link-sharing service has been making money and that profitability is right around the corner.

Although advertising continues to be the only seemingly reliable model for monetizing content-centric websites, Adelson reports that click-through rates are higher than expected. That being said, typical rates for online advertising are generally abysmal, so if Digg's ads are working better than most, good for them, and let's all study their model. Read - and watch - for the rest of the story on how Digg has grown and will continue to expand and monetize.

According to mobile marketing firm Brand in Hand, female iPhone users are the worst demographic in terms of interacting with mobile ads on the iPhone. The company, whose high-profile clients include Procter & Gamble, General Mills and American Express, has run 60+ mobile ad campaigns over the past two years. During that time, they've had the opportunity to study the engagement of iPhone users with their ads. So why are women ignoring the ads? Apparently, they're too busy actually using the apps.

YouTube's Promoted Videos - the video ads that often appear to the right of the currently playing video in YouTube and next to search results - are now coming to regular websites as well. Starting today, Promoted Videos will appear in AdSense units through the Google Content Network and will compete with text and image ads in AdSense's ad auctions. Interestingly, AdSense already offers video ads, though it classifies them as 'image ads.' These two video ad units will now run side by side.

Earlier this morning, we noticed a blog post that claimed that Twitter had started to test a new ad format on its users' profile pages today. These ads, which only one user had noticed, were supposedly text ads that appeared right under a user's follower numbers. Twitter is currently showing free ads for Twitter-related applications in this space. This would have been a very interesting story. The reality, however, isn't quite as exciting. The user who first noticed these 'new' ads simply forgot that she had installed the Power Twitter plugin for Firefox.

According to Unwired View, Google Voice just filed an application with Fish and Richardson legal services on a patent that is suspected to monetize caller waiting on Google Voice.

The patent application lays claim to the methods and software "in which an indication of a telephone call being placed from a calling number is received, and a determination is made of an audio advertisement to play based on the calling number."

This past week saw the Conversational Marketing (CM) Summit in New York, an event organized by Federated Media (which sells advertising on ReadWriteWeb). It was a stimulating event because of the good mix of all of the participants in the advertising eco-system (publishers and media, advertisers and marketers, advertising agencies, and advertising technology startups). The sessions included many case studies of large brands that use social media to engage customers in different ways, as well as new technology from startups. My one overriding impression was that creativity, in all its forms, is back. There was a real sense of a return on creativity.

After launching Bing just a few days ago, Microsoft also just released a mobile version of its new search engine. Bing mobile generally works as well as Bing does on the desktop. It's a capable search engine, and Microsoft's focus on turning Bing into a 'decision engine' is even more apparent here than in the full browser version. This means, for example, that Bing Mobile will try to figure out if you are more likely to be interested in seeing recent news reports about a search term, or if you want to see a map.

Roughly 5% of Firefox users run a plugin called AdBlock Plus, which effectively blocks all display and text ads on websites. There can be little doubt that the ethics of using a tool like this can get pretty tricky, though a lot of users do opt to block online ads; and given that this is mostly an all-or-nothing approach, once a user decides to block ads on one site that features exceptionally annoying ads, they will also block ads on every other site as well. Now, AdBlock Plus' developers have proposed a new meta tag that would allow site owners to pop up a notification for AdBlock Plus users, asking them if they want to block ads on a site that, according to the webmaster's own judgment, does not contain any "annoying advertising."

According to a report from Mediaweek, YouTube has sent written warnings to a number of content producers who feature their own advertisers in videos on Google's popular video service. YouTube, of course, is mostly interested in selling ads on its own network, and advertisers who buy overlay ads on YouTube don't want to see their messages mixed in with other sponsor announcements and product placements. A 'black market' for ad placements in videos is obviously something that YouTube, which is still struggling to find a viable monetization strategy, is not trying to encourage.

AdMob, one of the world's largest mobile advertising networks, released its Download Exchange today. In return for running ads for other apps, developers can now promote their own apps across AdMob's network of over 1,000 applications. At its core, Download Exchange is basically a more sophisticated version of the many banner and link exchange services that are very common on the Web.

Yesterday, as Facebook rolled out their revamped homepage which delivered new features like real-time updates, filters, and an improved sharing box, another update was quietly occurring behind the scenes. While everyone was busy analyzing the front-end changes to the user interface, Facebook announced to advertisers there were some major updates coming for them as well. According to a Facebook blog post, advertisers are now able to target ads based on languages spoken and the location of users.

Google is everywhere. From your web mail to your web searches and now even tracking your location on a map, the ubiquity of Google is something that many of us have just started taking for granted when we go online. But something a lot of people don't realize is that Google is also tapping into our information when we're offline. Case in point: Google TV Ads, a part of the company's AdWords channel gives Google access to DVR viewership data from millions of set-top boxes here in the United States.

The latest Mobile Advertising Report from market research agency GfK found that users of Apple's iPhone were more likely to recall and respond to ads than other mobile phone users. The reason for their higher response rates? Probably exposure. Although the report didn't come to this conclusion itself, it's somewhat apparent based on their findings. For example, iPhone owners are twice as likely to see mobile web ads and four times as likely to see an ad while playing a game on their phone or while using a location-based service.

During the U.S. presidential elections, one of the campaigning methods which got a lot of attention was President-Elect Obama's in-game billboard ad inserted into the Xbox 360 racing game, Burnout Paradise. Now a similar technology for embedding images is making its way into online, user-gen video. Instead of pre-rolls, post-rolls, or overlays, this technology allows for inserted images to be rendered onto any planar surface in a video, whether wall, floor, or ceiling. Oh, and they don't have to be images, either - the technology supports embedding videos within your videos, too.

This is the second post in a multi-part series about integrating the internet with the real world.

In "The Scannable World: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners," we introduced the concept of using your phone to scan barcoded objects in the real world. We also touched on some of the history surrounding this technology. One of the issues with barcoded ads today is where you find them: newspapers, arguably a dying medium whose subscriber base isn't necessarily composed of cutting-edge early adopters. So how can barcodes make their way to the people who actually use the web and other modern technologies? One company thinks they have the answer.

In June, we reported that Google had signed a deal with the creator of Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane. Under this deal, Google was going to syndicate a series of 50 short cartoon by MacFalrlane through AdSense and the Google Content network. Now, the first series of these cartoons is available on YouTube. This first wave of videos is sponsored by fast food chain Burger King, though we assume that other parts of the series will feature different sponsors.