The mobile ad space continued to heat up last week with Amobee’s acquisition of RingRing Media, a 2-year-old London-based startup, for an undisclosed sum. The move surely isn’t anywhere near the magnitude of Google’s $750 million AdMob buy or even Apple’s $275 million pick-up of Quattro Wireless, but it’s the kind of smaller-scale deal we’re likely to see many more of this year as the segment consolidates.

Mobile ad startups are hot commodities once again thanks largely to in-app marketing, which has given the segment a much-needed lift over the last year. Established Internet companies and software development companies alike are scrambling to gain a foothold in the space, much like in 2007, which saw a flurry of activity including AOL’s acquisition of Third Screen Media, Yahoo’s pick-up of Actionality, the Microsoft ScreenTonic buy and Nokia’s tie-up with Enpocket. While 2010 may not see as many blockbuster deals, the number of tie-ups could end up surpassing that of three years ago, Rich Wong of Accel Partners told me last week:

Brand managers now are spending in this medium. It’s real, and it’s genuine. I do think it’s going to be hard to have a quarterly earnings call as a major Internet company and not have an answer to the question, ‘What’s your mobile strategy?’

The landscape is far different now than it was just three years ago, though, when a handful of startups were quick to emerge in the nascent space. Recent figures from IDC indicate that Millennial Media is clearly the largest startup left on the field (see chart); the mobile search firm JumpTap is the second-largest potential acquisition despite a mere 4 percent market share. Yahoo and Microsoft claim a combined market share of only 19 percent — which may prompt the high-profile players to make an acquisition or two this year in order to build their mobile businesses.

The field also teems with smaller player that specialize in targeted areas such as search or that serve specific geographic regions. And recent growth in the space has given rise to a host of startups that play supporting roles by providing analytics and other tools. Flurry, which pocketed $7 million on the heels of its recent tie-up with Pinch Media, may be especially attractive to ad companies that don’t have their own mobile analytics operations.

So while we may see one or two more big-budget acquisitions in mobile advertising this year, most of the M&A activity will center on smaller startups. Entrenched firms with deep pockets will look to fill out the holes in their mobile ad businesses, and independent players will forge alliances to better compete with their larger counterparts. Those deals won’t make headlines, but they will reconfigure the landscape of mobile advertising in 2010.

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By Stephanie Chen CNN

(CNN) — If you’re on Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking site, you could be the next victim.

That’s because more cyberthieves are targeting increasingly popular social networking sites that provide a gold mine of personal information, according to the FBI. Since 2006, nearly 3,200 account hijacking cases have been reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI, the National White Collar Crime Center and the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

It starts with a friend updating his or her status or sending you a message with an innocent link or video. Maybe your friend is in distress abroad and needs some help.

All you have to do is click.

When the message or link is opened, social network users are lured to fake Web sites that trick them into divulging personal details and passwords. The process, known as a phishing attack or malware, can infiltrate users’ accounts without their consent.

Once the account is compromised, the thieves can infiltrate the list of friends or contacts and repeat the attack on subsequent victims. Social networking sites show there is ample opportunity to find more victims; the average Facebook user has 120 friends on the site.

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When will YouTube be profitable? “In the not-too-distant future,” said Google CFO Patrick Pichette on today’s quarterly earnings call, same as he said last quarter. He did offer a “sound bite” to appease investors and industry watchers: “We’re monetizing more than a billion video views every week on YouTube.” That’s out of “well over” a billion views that YouTube recently said it gets every day. So, let’s put on our fuzzy and unauthorized math thinking cap: There are seven days in a week. YouTube is monetizing in the neighborhood of 14 percent of its total views.

Google’s Nikesh Arora, president of global sales operations and business development, noted campaigns on YouTube’s home page have been undertaken with 90 percent of the top 50 advertisers. He said 90 percent of YouTube’s home-page inventory was sold out in the third quarter. Further, YouTube is beginning to release pre-roll inventory to advertisers — not the most-liked format for watchers or many in the industry, but a good way to make money. And the site is getting more premium content; it tied up a deal with Channel 4 this morning and straightened out its relationships with the music labels in recent weeks.

Google has come a long way from last year in its attitude towards YouTube, when CEO Eric Schmidt called YouTube monetization “the holy grail” and “our highest priority this year.”

“In general we’re really pleased about YouTube’s performance — it is going very well,” said Pichette. Arora added: “We’re pleased with our ability to monetize YouTube so far, and we like the trend.”

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The trough will get even deeper in 2010 as local online advertising continues to slow and as a bevy of new competitors rush in to become purveyors of hyperlocal everything. PBS, ESPN, AOL, Huffington Post, The Knot, Microsoft, Yahoo and scores of others have announced plans to reach deep into local ad sales. While they missed this crest, there is plenty of money yet to be made in local online ad sales.

Meanwhile, the next waves are forming on the horizon, as they always do, and companies that know what to look for can begin moving to catch them. Online promotions and mobile advertising are two such waves. This 2010 Outlook offers observations and forecasts intended to help that process.

Local online advertising will hit $14.2 billion this year, 12 percent more than 2008. For 2010 we are forecasting that it will grow just 5 percent, to $14.9 billion. In the past five years, local online advertising grew at a compound annual growth rate of 46.5 percent. For the next  five, we are expecting that rate to be 2.9 percent. The forecast is predicated upon a slow economic recovery and the fact that “online” as a local media advertising category is approaching what we believe is saturation. Online media buys currently hold a 13.8 percent share of all local advertising. We believe it will peak at a 16 percent share by 2013.

Unfortunately, one of the hottest growth categories – mobile – is not likely to play a significant role on the local media landscape next year. We are estimating that local buys will comprise only 20 percent of all mobile advertising, totaling slightly more than $500 million in 2010. Still, mobile is a category worth watching as the audience grows and as couponing, mobile directory advertising and sponsored text messages find viable applications for local marketers.

The game in 2010 will center more around stealing market share than growing the market. Local advertisers have had plenty of time to assess the effectiveness of banner ads, search, streaming video and e-mail advertising peddled to them over the past decade. They will abandon programs that just do not work, and embrace those that produce measurable results. They are also likely to continue following a few years behind the spending patterns of national advertisers by expanding their use of online promotions, which give them more direct access to their customers and prospects – without having to rely as heavily on media companies to help reach them.

Study provided by Borrell Associates. For more information and to download data samples visit www.borrellassociates.com

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By Janko Roettgers Gigaom Network

Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor this week published a list of essential guidelines on how to be successful online. Reznor knows a thing or two about Internet success. He became the best-selling artist on Amazon’s MP3 store despite giving his music and videos away for free, engaged his fans in a breath-taking Alternate Reality Game and recently became the Webby Artist of the year.

Critics have always argued that Reznor’s position is unique, and note that his band’s millions of fans around the world are thanks in no small part to promotion through his former major label. Reznor countered this kind of criticism by focusing his advice on the needs of aspiring newcomers. And while some of these suggestions may be specific to musicians, most of them actually make a lot of sense for up-and-coming online video makers as well. So since we here at NewTeeVee continue to get countless questions as to how to establish and promote new web shows, we’re stealing some of his best ideas and passing them on to you.

Here are five essential guidelines to establish yourself online:

“Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales.“ The same is true for video: Don’t expect to make tons of money with any of the existing video download stores, even if they offer you awesome revenue share agreements. Instead, opt for free and try to monetize other things down the road, once you have established an online fan base. The team at Ask A Ninja, for example, used DVD and t-shirt sales to finance their work before the big ad dollars started to roll in.  Reznor suggests collecting email addresses in exchange for free downloads and using these contacts to both advertise upcoming releases as well as merchandise sales. That’s a little harder if people watch your show on YouTube, but you could still promote your newsletter with t-shirt raffles and higher-quality downloads.

“[G]et your music everywhere.“ The same is true for video; don’t rely on just one site. Sign up with TubeMogul and let them put your video on YouTube, blip, MySpace and any other site possible.

“Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace.” Replace MySpace with YouTube, and you know what we’re talking about. There’s a good chance most people will see your show on the major video sites, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t at least have a blog somewhere else. Something that you can update even if you don’t have any new episodes, where people can leave comments. Having a place where you can gather a dedicated and friendly community can also be a great morale-booster, and you’re gonna need one of those when the inevitable bad-spirited commenters start to appear on your YouTube channel. Or, as one online video maker at the recent NewTeeVee LA meetup put it: “People on YouTube are mean!”

“Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times…Constantly update your site with content – pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time.“ Amen to that. Except for the inevitable embedded Flash video players, of course.

“Make cheap videos.“ Uhm, yeah. No, we don’t want you to spend less on lighting when you shoot your show’s episodes. But there’s inevitably gonna be a time when you have no new episode to publish. That’s when low lights and rough cuts are OK. Publish outtakes (if they’re funny), director’s commentary (if you have something to say) or faux celebrity sex tapes (if you’re into that kind of thing). OK, maybe you shouldn’t go with the last suggestion, but the point is to constantly put out something to remind people you’re still alive.

Have any other suggestions to share? Feel free to add them in the comments.

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