ReadWriteWeb

Updated: We've added a new chart at the bottom of the post.

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.

With a population approaching half of a billion users, if Facebook was its own nation it would be the third largest in the world behind China and India. With that in mind, it's no surprise that secondary activities on Facebook - like viewing videos - can still produce high rankings for the site that compete with the likes of Hulu and YouTube. One of the ways users on Facebook view video is through advertisements, and a recent study by TubeMogul revealed some interesting stats on which ones worked, and why.

We are all aware of the floundering print industry that has seen a steady decline in revenues over the last several years. Newspapers that once thrived on the cash-cows that were classifieds and print advertising have had their lunch eaten by the disruptive forces of Craigslist and online advertising, which have slowly chipped away at print ad sales. Soon, however, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Internet advertising revenues will surpass those of print advertising to become the second largest segment of advertising in the U.S. behind television.

Today Google introduced two new elements to its popular advertising system, a Search Funnel and something it is calling Ad Innovations.

The company's VP of product management, Susan Wojcicki, described the Search Funnel as a "set of reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion."

Nothing better illustrates the brokenness of the Internet's most traditional revenue model than the recent crop of ad-stripping services.

"Users want to have a clean layout to read a blog or news site," said TidyRead developer Matthew Chen. His Firefox add-on creates a sweet, hyper-relevant overlay as users browse through content, blocking out all the noise and distraction while leaving the cream of the content fully intact.

The U.S. newspaper industry was already facing numerous challenges before the economy took a nosedive, but the latest data from the Newspaper Association of America shows that the current economic climate has only exacerbated the already dire state of the American newspaper industry. Specifically, total newspaper advertising revenue fell 16.6% in 2008. Classifieds advertising, which is under a lot of pressure from online ventures like Craigslist, fell almost 30%, and real estate classifieds fell 38%.

For the fourth in our series of VC interviews, we spoke with Richard de Silva at Highland Capital Partners. Richard specializes in digital media; for example, he is on the Board of Digg. So, he seemed like the right person to ask about the theories floating around the blogosphere that we are in an advertising bubble and that online advertising is doomed.

OpenX, an open source ad server for web publishers, released statistics today to show its strong recent growth - especially in the last 6 months. We interviewed the CEO of OpenX, Tim Cadogan, about the data. We also wanted to know how OpenX compares with Google's competitor Ad Manager, and we discovered how exactly OpenX will make money.

According to OpenX, as of December 2008 more than 300 billion ad impressions now run through its software every month. Its core product is still the open source OpenX Ad Server - version 2.6 was launched August 2008 and included a new API. This product has had more than 10,000 active downloads and is getting a 25 billion monthly ad impression run rate.