In return, WordPress is offering independent publishers a chance to make money on the WordPress platform. WordPress already provides a healthy living for thousands of self-employed developers, and now publishers have a chance to earn money from their WordPress content, too.

Federated Media is known for representing high-traffic sites. We at ReadWriteWeb work with FM, for example. But Federated Media recently acquired Lijit Networks, which will help it improve its targeting of ads to long-tail content.

WordPress.com blogs, in total, receive almost 300 million monthly unique visitors, so the partnership between FM and Automattic, parent company of WordPress, is a great opportunity for its advertisers.

You Deserve Better Than AdSense

"We've resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn't terribly tasteful," says the WordPress announcement. "It seemed like Google's AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense." WordPress wants to serve ads that reflect the individual nature of its bloggers, and the WordAds program, targeted with Lijit's technology, can enable that.

WordPress Is A Job Creator

According to founder Matt Mullenweg in his 2011 State of the Word Address, there are thousands of self-employed developers making a living on the WordPress platform. His voluntary survey recorded 6,800 developers who have built 170,000 sites between them, making a median hourly rate of $50.

WordPress is building a community for independent workers, both developers and publishers, and it's finding ways to make them money and keep them afloat. That's admirable. It may have to resort to some traffic tricks to keep up with the likes of Tumblr, but it does so in order to keep its community going.

Disclosure: Federated Media is ReadWriteWeb's advertising partner.

What content management system(s) do you use, and why?

Still, no one likes surprise opt-out uses of personal data. Complaints about this perceived breach of privacy have made the rounds over the last day or so. LinkedIn has just posted a response to the backlash offering some clarifications.

The post contends that LinkedIn is merely "testing" social ads. The company did update its privacy policy in June, making the coming changes quite clear. The new ads, as well as the opt-out policy, were not sprung on users by surprise this week (unless they missed the memo). The post also clarifies that the information is not shared with third parties, and it only uses profile information that anyone in your LinkedIn network could see, anyway.

But, of course, opt-in is always better than opt-out for new ways of using personal data. It's too bad that LinkedIn had to bruise its users' trust this way, but at least we have the option to opt out. If you'd like to turn off LinkedIn's social ads, here's how you do it:

• In the drop-down menu from your name in the top right of the screen, click 'Settings.'
• Click the 'Account' tab with the shield icon.
• Choose the first option, 'Manage Social Advertising.'
• Uncheck the box and click 'Save.'

There. That wasn't so bad.

According to Johnson's post on Google Plus (but of course), the Facebook advertisement originally read:

"If you're lucky enough to have a Google+ account, add Michael Lee Johnson, Internet Geek, App Developer, Technological Virtuoso."

The ad only ran for an hour before it was shut down, says Johnson. The reason? At first, Facebook wouldn't really say. The company only sent a vague email, which read:

"Your account has been disabled. All of your adverts have been stopped and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Generally, we disable an account if too many of its adverts violate our Terms of Use or Advertising guidelines. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms of Use and Advertising guidelines if you have any further questions."

Facebook also banned Johnson from its advertising platform, Johnson added via the comments on his Google Plus post.

As of today, Facebook has still not restored Johnson's ability to place Facebook ads.

Why Did This Happen?

The event, which was covered by numerous news outlets over the weekend (and yours truly, on Google Plus), positions Facebook as the big bad bully, afraid of its relatively small competition from Google. With 10 million users, Google Plus isn't even close to Facebook's 750 million, and won't be for a long, long time. Maybe ever.

So why did the social network ban the ad?

CNET speculated that Facebook simply opted to use this portion of its Advertising Guidelines:

"We may refuse ads at any time for any reason, including our determination that they promote competing products or services or negatively affect our business or relationship with our users."

In other words, Facebook has the right to refuse service at any time, especially if you're advertising its competition.

And as it turns out, that's precisely what happened here. In a separate email, sent after the initial message, Facebook did provide the reason for the ban as follows:

"We reserve the right to choose the advertisements that appear on the site, and ads for this product or service should not be resubmitted."

That couldn't be more clear: Facebook will not allow ads for Google Plus. Period.

But by taking this position, Facebook has demonstrated that it may actually fear the challenge that Google presents. Given Facebook's size, and the still-debated scalability of using "Circles" to manage friendships, it seems a bit premature for Facebook to go on the defensive like this.

In response, Johnson has now deleted his Facebook account, he says. But he only deleted the Facebook account he used for personal contacts, not the one he used for work. The gesture is more symbolic than anything - Facebook, even in offending an avid Google Plus supporter, didn't really lose his business.

For more on Google Plus Circles, see also: Google Plus' Circles System May Not be Sustainable.

Through a mobile app running on customers' phones, marketers can offer a variety of follow-up actions to the TV viewer, including coupons, reminders, contact info and more. In total, there are 10 follow-up actions offered. And the consumer is in complete control of which ones, if any, they respond to.

The company behind WiO, WiOffer, is the creation of Andrew Pakula and Matthew Greene, both of whom have experience working in and with major media, tech and digital marketing firms, including DoubleClick, Yahoo and Ogilvy. This experience, Pakula explains, has allowed them to learn a lot about what customers respond to and how.

How the WiO-Enabled TV Commercials Work

Before a customer can use the WiO app, the commercial or TV show has to first be WiO-enabled. To do this, the advertiser sends WiOffer their asset - that is, their commercial or the portion of the show where the product placement is visible and/or mentioned by the characters within the program. Using the clip as a digital ID, the mobile WiO app running on customers' phones can then "hear" when the commercial plays and pop up a screen offering more information.

There are 10 different options a customer can choose from, some of which are subject to what the advertiser is providing. These include access to coupons, PDF brochures, app downloads, website addresses, retail locators, contact information, calendar events, reminders and even one option which will auto-dial the advertiser directly, in the case of TV commercials where a phone number is displayed. The unique thing about connecting TV to the mobile platform in this way is how many of these tasks are automated. For example, choosing the reminders, calendar event or contact info options will instantly save that information to a customer's phone, with no manual effort required on the customer's part.

In addition, when coupons are provided, the customer can save these "WiOffers" on their phone, where they will be accessible until the expiration date. To use a coupon, the customer just has to show their phone to the retailer.

Meanwhile, on the advertisers' side, metrics surrounding customer response can be tracked in real-time, allowing them to adjust their advertising and offers on the fly to boost engagement, as need be.

Competition in the New TV Landscape

WiO is not the only company with this same idea. The music identification app Shazam recently raised funds to push into television. Some TV shows and ads now tell viewers to "Shazam" them in order to receive bonus content and discounts, AllThingsD reports. Another company, IntoNow, uses audio recognition to encourage users to "check in" to what they're watching on TV. GetGlue offers something similar. Even Microsoft is getting into the action with its NUads advertising platform, which uses the voice and gesture control in its Kinect for Xbox 360 to create interactive TV ads.

But unlike with Xbox, WiO is device agnostic, Greene says. He insists that WiO is different than the so-called "social apps," too. Even though WiO allows for sharing to Facebook, Twitter, SMS and email, its goal is not to socialize the TV-watching experience. "Check-ins are a bit of distraction," says Greene, "if not an enormous distraction." And, referring to Shazam, he claims the idea of connecting a music app to actual transactions is a bit complicated. The Shazam ads point you to a mobile landing page, he notes. WiO aims to connect the brand directly to the customer so they can start talking immediately.

The WiO app will launch in a few weeks, first on iPhone. It will arrive on Android 60 days later. The company says it can't comment on its advertising partners at this time, but from what we saw, there are some well-known brands in talks with the company now.

These shares, which would have appeared in your friends' News Feeds anyway, are now given special promotion by way of a Facebook ad that appears on the right-hand side of the homepage. The ad will display your friend's name, photo, a picture and link to the relevant Facebook Page or application, plus any likes and comments.

Does this sort of user-generated advertising sound familiar? It should - Twitter is doing nearly the same thing.

Twitter's Promoted Tweets service was introduced last spring, offering advertisers similar options for generating ads from the social networking site's content. It was an new concept for advertising - taking content that would have appeared within the service's search results (the de facto way to see what people are saying about a given subject on Twitter) - and highlighting that content through a top-of-the-page ad showcasing the promoted tweet itself.

In November, Twitter announced it would begin rolling out the Promoted Tweets into users' timelines, too, through its partner, HootSuite, a provider of a popular Twitter client application.

But in Twitter's case, Promoted Tweets didn't come from just anyone's content - they could only be selected from the advertiser's account or those affiliated with it. A promoted tweet wouldn't be stolen content from an unsuspecting user.

Of course, that's not Facebook's way.

How Facebook's Sponsored Stories Work

With Facebook's Sponsored Stories, your activity is now up for grabs, available to the advertiser associated with the brand, business or app you interacted with.

Just checked in to a restaurant? That's an ad. Just liked a brand? That's an ad. Just shared a news story from the Web? That's an ad.

At launch, Facebook's Sponsored Stories partners are Coke, Levi's, Anheuser Busch and Playfish, plus nonprofits like Donors Choose, Girl Up!, Malaria No More, Amnesty International, Women for Women, Autism Speaks, (RED), Alzheimer's Association and UNICEF.

Oh, and there's no way to opt-out, says Facebook. "While there is no way to opt out of seeing all or being featured in any Sponsored Stories, you can remove specific stories by clicking the 'X' displayed in the upper right side of a story and choosing the appropriate option when prompted."

The stories also respect your Facebook privacy settings, so only people who can read your News Feed stories can see the Sponsored Stories.

Advertising Transparency?

The funny thing about these "personalized recommendations," as Facebook calls them, is that an ad could come from a restaurant check-in that led to the worst meal of your life or it could show up after you "liked" a retailer only because they were running an ad that said "like us on Facebook for 10% off."

Your friends would see the promoted activity - activity that may or may not tell the whole story of your interaction with that business. Unless you comment on the item to explain, all your friends would see is the activity itself.

On the flip side, that does raise an interesting question - what if you did comment on the activity? What if, say, after a check-in at a restaurant, you commented about the terrible food or service? Because Sponsored Stories display the likes and comments, your friends would now be able to see your complaint, too. But do advertisers have any way of knowing that? And can they pull a Sponsored Story if so? That's a key point, and it's unclear what level of control advertisers have here. It's important though, because real personalized recommendations work both ways - they deliver the good news and the bad. Without both sides represented, this is just a new way to spam your friends.

Future Implications

While on the one hand, the fact that my activity is now being turned into ads for my friends makes me feel a little icky inside, I don't totally hate this idea. I would like to see what new restaurants my friends are trying, what online articles they found worth sharing, where they shop, etc. That's the least offensive kind of advertising I can imagine, and arguably, the most effective, too, if done right.

What's even more interesting about this integration, however, are the future implications it brings to mind. Thanks to the Facebook/Microsoft partnership, these types of personalized recommendations could soon find their way into Microsoft's Bing search engine, for example. That could finally hit the sweet spot for personalized search.

One of the complaints about the limitations of the Facebook Like is that your friends aren't going to go around liking boring things like household appliances or other sorts of items undeserving of a Facebook share. But by including check-ins and website shares in this advertising initiative, it's easy to imagine a future where a Bing search for a refrigerator delivers a results page that tells you: "John just checked in to Sears on Monday" and commented "great appliance sale!"

That could be interesting.

Maybe a little creepy, too. But if there's one thing Facebook doesn't shy away from is toeing the creepy line, to see how much invasiveness its users will tolerate before crying out "privacy violation!"

The funniest thing about this new form of advertising is that it's actually far more intrusive than Instant Personalization, which simply shared select profile info with partner websites on an opt-out basis. Instant Personalization received federal regulator attention, while this move will likely fly under the radar, despite the fact that it co-opts your content for ads, with no opt-out option at all.

Creepy. Genius. Nice move, Facebook.

Source, Image Credits: Inside Facebook, Facebook.com

For some of us, watching YouTube on a mobile device is an additional way to watch video, not the primary way. But as it turns out, for a large majority of mobile video users, it's completely the opposite.

As noted by the Google Mobile Ads blog post reporting this data, these figures aren't really a surprise. It referenced a recent Nielsen survey that found that YouTube Mobile is the number one mobile video viewing site in the U.S., with more than 7.1 million uniques.

Of course, Google is revealing this news to get at mobile advertisers - the post mentions that advertisers can now buy a "daily roadblock" which allows them to own all available ad impressions for 24 hours. Those ads would run on the Search, Browse and Home pages of the mobile website.

Obviously, that's a great way to reach a wide audience of video viewers in the U.S., but advertisers should realize that these are only the viewers who head to the website m.youtube.com. As described on the Advertising page for this product, the roadblocks reach those who "engage with the mobile site on the homepage, browse and search pages from any mobile device including Android, iPhone, Blackberry, and feature phones."

Browse and search pages, it says. Web pages, not apps.

The blog post's image depicts a recent campaign for Diet Coke on top smartphones including the iPhone, Blackberry and Android. However, on these devices, YouTube viewers have access to native applications pre-installed on their phones. Wouldn't it be fair to assume that more streams come through those apps on the smartphones? How much of the smartphone audience is being targeted when you buy an ad on m.youtube.com? We've reached out to some mobile video experts to further research this and will collate our findings into a future post on ReadWriteMobile. Stay tuned.

But while $100,000 is a lot of money to most, Twitter's Promoted Tweets and its other initiative, Promoted Trends, are experimental, largely unproven and not worth the investment - at least that's what several advertisers and marketers cited by the WSJ claimed. Their feelings on that matter, however, may soon change thanks to plans Twitter has in store for its ads service.

The Wall St. Journal article largely focused on the state of Twitter's advertising to date. It noted that some of the early ad customers, major brands like Pepsi and Best Buy, both of which got to test drive the ad service for free, haven't made new ad buys on Twitter.

Meanwhile, some marketers report that Twitter doesn't offer good enough targeting and analytics to make the ads worth the money, especially when they can just as easily create a free account on Twitter and interact with the Twitter community directly, the article explains.

However, Twitter countered these claims by talking statistics: 80% of the companies that tried Promoted Tweets did make a second buy. And, as Twitter Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo, told AdAge recently, the click-through rates on tweets are 5%, a number that's much higher than the 1% a standard display ad on the Web sees today.

AdAge also highlighted the experience Coca-Cola had with Twitter ads, noting that the company has seen even higher interaction rates with the ads than Costolo is now reporting. However, the beverage giant's Twitter account only grew from 50,000 to 122,000 followers - certainly not the sort of growth worth writing home about.

That particular case study demonstrates one of the issues companies have with Twitter - people are very selective about who they follow. That means if a brand wants to get in front of Twitter users' eyeballs, they need other ways to do so beyond getting a user to follow them back. Inserting ads, promotions and other messages into Twitter's most popular features, like its Trends list and Search results page, just make sense for companies wanting to reach this active community.

Ads to Roll Out Beyond Twitter.com

And soon, these ads will make even more sense: Twitter plans to spread its advertising beyond Twitter.com. Starting in November, Twitter ads will arrive in the numerous third-party applications that make up the Twitter ecosystem. AdAge reports too, that Twitter is experimenting with other advertising initiatives, including a Promoted Accounts feature that would accompany Twitter's Suggested Users, a recommendations feature that serves as the way new Twitter users find interesting accounts to follow.

Twitter won't reveal the number of searches it sees on Twitter.com, but touts its other numbers instead: 160 million accounts and 100 million tweets and 370,000 new users per day. Those stats led AdAge to believe (and us as well) that the number of searches on Twitter is quite high indeed. Twitter ads may still be "experimental" and marketer reaction may be mixed, we think that the ads will ultimately prove a successful revenue stream for the company, but not its only one.

"Twitter @earlybird Exclusive Offers are special time-bound deals, sneak-peeks, and events that are promoted by the official Twitter @earlybird account. We partner with select advertisers and retweet offers that they have crafted only for the Twitter community."

If this is another arguable Twitter ad success story, the thought occurs, what other types of accounts could Twitter launch in this arena?

As of Tuesday afternoon, no deals are up on the @earlybird account, but that could change at any moment.

Last month, Twitter started promoting ad keywords in its "trending topics" list. With this system, users are brought to a search results page, where the page is topped by a promoted Tweet. But does it work is the question.

The answer seems to be yes. Today the National Basketball Association purchased "LeBron James" as a trending topic. Discussion on Mr. James has increased markedly since then. Since the topic has been purchased it has gone from 500 Tweets per hour to 3,000 and rising.

Knowing whether the purchase was a wise one will require time. If the purchased topic keeps trending, it may indicate a safe bet for future advertisers.

While it's surprising that dating services are the most detested among Facebook ads, it does make sense. Dating ads can tend to be some of the most transparent of advertisements online, especially on a site like Facebook, which has info about your sexual preference, age and location, depending on privacy settings. Though the ads are trying to create a personalized experience, when users see ads for meeting singles in their town within their age range, the ads seem intrusive and creepy.

There also may be a correlation between how users approach Facebook and their distaste for dating site advertisements. From my personal experience with online dating and matchmaking sites, I can attest that your activity on the site is not something you tend to share with many of your friends. With Facebook's recent concerns over privacy, users may be afraid to associate their online dating activities with their personal social graph on Facebook.

The survey by Inside Facebook also found that advertisements that linked to sites outside of Facebook were less liked by respondents. Nearly two-thirds said they dislike ads for outside links the most as opposed to links to Facebook fan pages or events. An advertisement for Coca-Cola, for example, is preferred when it is an add for Coca-Cola's fan page, not for an outside site run by the company. Perhaps dating sites need to advertise their fan pages, but something tells me that wouldn't go over well either.

"Over the next five years digital technologies will progressively increase their impact across all segments of entertainment and media (E&M) as digital transformation continues to expand and escalate," a press release from PwC said Tuesday. "The uncertain economic background has done nothing to slow the pace of change, which has been far quicker than predicted 12 months ago. It is clear that the consumer is firmly in the driving seat of these changes."

According to the report, increased access to broadband has played a large role in helping boost online ad revenues. The Wall Street Journal reports that broadband penetration in the U.S. nearly doubled from 34% in 2005 to 64% in 2010 thanks partly to $7.2 billion in federal stimulus money put towards expanding broadband access. Additionally, PricewaterhouseCoopers expects that global consumer spending on Internet access will increase from $228 billion 2009 to $351 billion in 2014.

It was only a matter of time until online ad sales outpaced those of print, and once they do, they will only continue to gain momentum. Legacy media are driven by numbers and are slow to change their ways, and thus have not thrown their entire weight behind online initiatives. When the scales tip over to online advertising in the next year, those that have been reluctant to embrace new and online media will be forced to allocate additional resources to the winning market.

The ultimate demise of print media is still many years away, but it is pretty clear that ad revenues are slowly dropping away. It will take one of the predominant newspapers ceasing to print physical copies to set off the domino effect that will likely follow, but it is unlikely to happen any time soon. While newspaper ad revenues have been falling, they've been leveling out, and a balance between print and online is likely to exist for several years before print entirely fades away.

Medialets has already partnered with well-known publishers to help launch mobile ad campaigns on Android devices. Earlier this year, New York Magazine launched an Android application with a featured set of Starbucks advertisements built on the Medialets Android SDK. Other publications, like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and NPR have also taken advantage of Medialets in the past.

Medialets already provides a Universal SDK for iPhone and iPad, giving advertisers a wide network of options for mobile ad initiatives. As the company points out, combining campaigns on both networks using both SDKs is an effective way to reach a wide audience of smartphone users. Medialets also provides analytics that allows publishers to view stats on their efforts across all supported platforms.

Advertising on the Android platform is looking more and more attractive as Apple tightens restrictions for ad networks operating on iPhone and iPad applications. As more publishers look to serve ads to more devices, Medialets is emerging as a popular platform on which to launch their campaigns. With other mobile ad networks creating competition - like Pinch Media and Mobclix - it may be the cross-platform solutions that garner more attention from publishers.

Google says its cut for content and search ads goes toward the "costs for our continued investment in AdSense -- including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads." These costs are yet to be solidified for their other AdSense offerings, such as mobile applications, feeds, games and YouTube ads, and thus these splits were not revealed today.

Twitter argues that it wants to create "a platform of enduring value." To do so, Costolo says, Twitter has to ensure that the platform remains valuable for its users. In-stream advertisers, however, are only interested in short-term revenue opportunities - which come at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. Costolo also argues that these in-stream advertising networks are simply not innovative enough, and "the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization."

The real reason for banning in-stream ads, however, becomes obvious after reading this paragraph:

"It is important to keep in mind that Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests, and scaling the service. Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support emails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison."

Twitter simply doesn't want to bear the cost of supporting these advertising networks that don't bring the company any direct value and revenue. Prohibiting in-stream ads isn't so much about fostering innovation and preserving the integrity of the platform. Instead, it's about ensuring that advertisers flock to Twitter's own Promoted Tweets.

Shutting Down the Most Natural Way to Monetize Twitter Clients

It will be interesting to see how third-party developers will react to this. Just a few weeks ago, Twitter began launching its own official Twitter clients, and now the company has prohibited the most obvious method of monetizing unofficial clients. Instead of being able to insert ads into users' streams - the most natural place for these ads - developers will now have to show ads outside of the stream. As Costolo puts it, "There will be all sorts of other third-party monetization engines that crop up in the vicinity of the timeline." Starting today, however, the stream itself is off-limits for all advertisers besides Twitter itself.

The iFlash ad format has become so popular, in fact, that Greystripe is just now announcing a 200% growth spike for these "iFlash" ads following the iAds announcement.

Greystripe's CEO Michael Chang sees iAds' imitation as a form of flattery in this case, proof that his company is doing it right. "Apple's selection of an ad format almost identical to our 'iFlash Custom' ads is a testament to the incredible potential of interactive, rich media mobile advertising and the value of customer engagement," he is quoted as saying.

The company claims it holds a 75% market share on the full screen rich media mobile market and have ads that reach 14 million unique monthly users in the U.S. Over the past two years, it has served over 2 billion full screen rich media impressions. Recent reports from comScore Inc. put the CTR for these iFlash ads at 2-5% on average, with 15-30+ seconds of user engagement.

While "fat-fingering" may contribute to some accidental ad launches, it's the engagement time that's really telling. Spending half a minute watching or interactivity with an ad is proof that creative, engaging ads can and do appeal to mobile users. (At least for now. Web banner ads used to be popular too, believe it or not).

Flash's Backdoor to iPhone

What's interesting about this news, besides, of course, the incredible growth rates the company is seeing, is how the iFlash ad technology actually works. It takes pre-created rich media ad units that were built using Adobe Flash and transcodes them to run on the iPhone, iPod Touch and, as of this month, iPad. The resulting ads are transformed into HTML5 format, a web standard that is supported on Apple's iPhone operating system.

For ad developers used to working with Flash technology, iFlash is essentially a workaround for the Flash ban on Apple devices, explained in detail by Steve Jobs himself back in April.

Apple caused quite a stir when it announced that iPhone apps created using Adobe's now-discontinued Packager for iPhone would not be allowed into the iTunes App Store, prompting Jobs' eventual response to all the hubbub. The Adobe software had allowed developers to create mobile applications using Flash and then port those to an iPhone-ready format. Although the technologies behind the Adobe converter and the iFlash transcoder are quite different on the back-end, the idea is the same: create with Flash, then port to iPhone.

With Apple's iAds launch just around the corner, one wonders if Apple will continue to allow a Flash transcoding product that competes directly with their own advertising initiatives to remain in business. Booting them out, though, would be tricky. After all, iFlash ads are in supported HTML5 format. Still, considering Jobs' opinions on Flash, it must irk him to see that Flash developers have found such an easy workaround for the Flash ban, if not for apps, at least for ads.