This additional seed of Series D financing brings the total money raised for Trada to $17 million.

Trada basically lets you offload your PPC management onto a community of SEM experts, who spend the budgets you set up as they see best. The money is spent on Google, Bing, Facebook and other PPC platforms and Trada handles the payment exchange between the SEMs and the company advertising, while taking a small percentage of that spend.

Trada’s CEO told TechCrunch that they hope to be “profitable by the end of 2012.”

In January 2011, the highest earning Optimizer (paid search or Facebook expert) in the Trada marketplace earned $4,500 for the month. Last month, the top earner made $14,500, or $175,000 annualized earnings. And at the beginning of 2011, the startup’s largest advertiser had a monthly budget of about $35,000 per month. Today, Trada’s largest advertiser budget is $500,000.

Tim Mayer, former Yahoo executive, formerly worked at Trada and recently left last month to found a new company called “Heddle.”

Related Stories:

• Crowdsourced SEM “Marketplace” Trada Raises $5.75M From Google Ventures & Others
• Tim Mayer: Search Vet & Ex-Yahoo Lands At Trada

Acquisio’s existing clients will gain access to the Channel Intelligence Shopping Engines and Channel Intelligence Product Search solutions. ClickEquations clients will now be managed and supported by Acquisio and will have access to all Acquisio services.

More information about the acquisition and partnership is available in this press release.

Adobe has agreed to acquire digital marketing agency Efficient Frontier, which has a strong search marketing practice and technology to manage Facebook advertising. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal.

The companies said Efficient Frontier would become a part of Adobe’s Digital Marketing suite, which includes technologies and services it acquired with web analytics and optimization firm Omniture in 2009.

Adobe has long been building up its capabilities in the digital marketing space, largely through acquisition. Earlier this month, it bought Auditude, a video ad management and monetization technology firm. In January, 2011, it purchased Demdex, a data management and audience optimization company. In July of 2010 the company got into web content management with the acquisition of Day Software.

Efficient Frontier began operations as a search marketing company helping large enterprise clients utilize algorithmic technology — using financial trading as a model — to maximize their investments in the space. Since its start, the company has expanded into other digital marketing arenas, notably including Facebook and display advertising.

Adobe says the Facebook and Search-related capabilities will be integrated into its existing Adobe SearchCenter+ offering, and the related analytics will be built into Adobe SocialAnalytics. Efficient Frontier also uses search-like optimization technologies in the display arena via ad exchanges. Adobe says these capabilities will work with the Digital Marketing Suite and its Dynamic Ad Targeting solution.

Efficient Frontier itself last month acquired Australia-based Downstream Marketing, which it called the largest provider of digital marketing technology and services in Australia. Efficient Frontier’s clients include BabyCenter, The Motley Fool, Bankrate, Ask.com, and Home Away/Holiday Rentals.

The acquisition will have to go through the usual government and board-of-director approvals, but Adobe expects it to close early in 2012.

Baidu holds a 73 percent market share in China, the world’s largest internet market. The company is worth $38 billion and is 57 percent larger than Yahoo. Its shares have doubled in value since Google “withdrew” from China to Hong Kong earlier this year.

Baidu CEO Robin Li (41) got a masters at SUNY Buffalo. He once worked at Infoseek and is now the second richest man in China.

The piece contains a number of allegations, which Baidu denies, about unethical practices:

For years legions of advertisers have complained on Chinese Web forums that Baidu secretly penalizes the search rankings of websites that decrease their spending on Baidu . . . In 2008 the company quickly denied Internet chatter claiming it had taken money from Sanlu Group, a dairy producer that had sold milk powder tainted with the toxic chemical melamine, to keep the scandal out of search . . .

Baidu says it is not a kingdom built on Internet piracy, though music companies say its popular MP3 service allows users to download just about any song ever recorded for free. The recording industry sued in 2005, but Chinese district and appeals courts sided with Baidu . . .

Censorship is also willingly practiced by the company:

Like all Chinese Web companies, and Google’s Chinese language site until this year, at the behest of the Chinese government Baidu blocks pornography or references to topics such as Taiwanese independence, the Dalai Lama, and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The practice is called zi lu, or “self-discipline,” and Baidu does it well. Last year the company accepted one of 20 awards from the Internet Society of China, given for what the group calls “industry self-regulation.”

Baidu was the direct beneficiary of Google’s ouster from the mainland. It’s unlikely that Baidu had anything to do with the GMail hacking incident that caused Google to declare it would no longer cooperate on censorship. But there have been persuasive allegations that the Chinese government or its surrogates were behind the hack attack. If so perhaps the government was trying to indirectly bring about what has in fact happened: the marginalizing of Google in China and the elevation of a cooperative partner, Baidu, to near monopoly status.

Google saw itself as a force for change and helping open up Chinese society by degrees. The Chinese government obviously doesn’t want any part of that.

The story also touches on another success issue, that the Chinese government may have helped Baidu with making Google unreliable:

Google never materialized as a threat, for reasons that no one can agree on. What’s clear is that Google’s China service was mysteriously unreliable, particularly when the Chinese government was angry with the U.S. Google also documented several instances when it was the victim of what’s called domain name system poisoning; users typed in Google.cn and found themselves at Baidu instead.

A New York Times Magazine article from 2006 details this more:

But even after being unblocked, Google still had troubles. The Great Firewall tends to slow down all traffic coming into the country from the world outside. About 15 percent of the time, Google was simply unavailable in China because of data jams. The firewall also began punishing curious minds: whenever someone inside China searched for a banned term, the firewall would often retaliate by sending back a command that tricked the user’s computer into believing Google itself had gone dead. For several minutes, the user would be unable to load Google’s search page — a digital slap on the wrist, as it were. For Google, these delays and shutdowns were a real problem, because search engines like to boast about delivering results in milliseconds. Baidu, Google’s chief Chinese-language rival, had no such problem, because its servers were located on Chinese soil and thus inside the Great Firewall. Worse, Chinese universities had virtually no access to foreign Web sites, which meant that impressionable college students — in other countries, Google’s most ardent fans — were flocking instead to Baidu.

Still Baidu must constantly “curry favor” with the communist regime. According to the article, government displeasure can result in investigations or critical profiles in state-run media:

In November 2008, government-operated China Central Television aired several in-depth investigations about Baidu surrounding allegations that the company earned millions on ads from unlicensed medical providers, and prominently displaying these ads when users typed health-related queries. The first story ran on Li’s 40th birthday, timing that no one at Baidu dismissed as coincidental. The following quarter, Baidu boosted its ad spending by 41 percent, with the bulk of the increase going to CCTV. Few Chinese Internet watchers thought it was a coincidence when the negative coverage ceased.

Baidu now wants to expand horizontally and globally, “into games, e-commerce, and online payments, establishing a Hulu-like video site called Qiyi, and exporting the Baidu brand abroad.” Li is quoted in the article saying he wants Baidu to be a global internet power:

I hope in ten years, Baidu will become a household name in 50 percent of the world. Sooner or later you will see a China-based company that really has a global impact and I think Baidu has a chance to become one of those companies. We should be able to compete on a global basis.

Generally Li comes off relatively well in the article, as a humble Chinese engineer living in the US who was inspired by Yahoo’s co-Founder Jerry Yang. Li had come up with a “link analysis” system similar to Page Rank. And there are other interesting parallels between Baidu and Google, not all of them coincidental.

Though Baidu is Chinese through and through, Silicon Valley money started the company. And early investors made a huge killing, comparable to what happened with Google, when it went public. Interestingly Baidu initially modeled itself on inktomi, which powered search at Yahoo before Google came along.

Li and Xu were much more interested in being the next Inktomi . . . Baidu licensed its search index to Sina and Sohu.com, then the dominant portals in China, and charged them each time a user conducted a search. Busy copying Yahoo’s portal business model, those companies didn’t realize search’s potential, concedes Charles Zhang, chairman and CEO of Sohu. “

Later the company developed its own site when its relationships with the Chinese portals went sour. It was at this point that the company was almost acquired for $40 million by Yahoo:

Finian Tan, then a Hong Kong-based partner at ePlanet, says he was so worried about the company’s prospects that he contacted Jerry Yang, an ePlanet investor, and offered to sell Baidu to Yahoo for $40 million . . . [Yang] referred the matter to a Yahoo colleague, who did not respond. (Yang declined to comment for this story.) Baidu had no choice but to devote its energies to its own website. “We became Baidu.com because we were forced into it,” Tang says.

That wasn’t the only acquisition attempt. There were several near acquisitions of Baidu before it went public, which sound very similar to the early history of Google.

In 2004, “Google contributed $5 million to Baidu’s $15 million third round of financing . . . [the] investment was meant to lay the groundwork for a possible acquisition and ward off the possibility that rivals could buy it.” Later, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son “wanted to keep Baidu private and offered to invest $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. Yahoo and Microsoft  made acquisition offers at a little over $1 billion . . . Google … ultimately made a $1.6 billion bid.”

One of the early investors and Baidu board member, Asad Jamal, said that “a $2 billion bid would have cemented an acquisition. ‘I personally think that was a missed opportunity for Google.’”

Missed opportunity? Clearly.

Here are some verbatim excerpts from the SEC filing:

Negotiation and Execution of the Definitive Agreements

Pursuant to the terms of the Letter Agreement, the parties will negotiate and execute the Definitive Agreements as soon as practicable but in any event by October 27, 2009 (the “Negotiation Period”). If the Definitive Agreements are not executed during the Negotiation Period, the parties will submit any disputes regarding the final terms of the Definitive Agreements to an arbitration panel.

Conditions to Commencement and Termination Prior to Commencement

Prior to the Commencement Date, the Letter Agreement and Definitive Agreements may be terminated only by (a) mutual consent, (b) if a breach renders a condition incapable of being satisfied by the Termination Date (as defined below), or (c) if the conditions to commencement have not been satisfied by July 29, 2010 (the “Termination Date”); provided that Yahoo!, in its sole discretion, has the right to extend the Termination Date by six (6) months if the required antitrust approvals have not yet been obtained.

Search and Advertising Services and Sales Agreement

For a period of ten (10) years beginning on the Commencement Date (the “Term”), Microsoft will be Yahoo!’s exclusive technology provider for algorithmic and paid search services and Microsoft will provide contextual advertising to Yahoo! on a non-exclusive basis. Yahoo! will be the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s premium search advertisers.

The services provided by Microsoft under the Search Agreement will be provided on all web sites, applications and other online digital properties owned or operated by or on behalf of (a) Yahoo!, Yahoo! subsidiaries and Yahoo! joint venture relationships, as well as on software applications developed or distributed by Yahoo! or Yahoo! subsidiaries that provide access to or enable algorithmic search services or paid search services (“Yahoo! Properties”) and (b) Yahoo! Syndication Partners (as defined below), as well as software applications developed or distributed by Yahoo!’s Syndication Partners that provide access to or enable algorithmic search services or paid search services from Yahoo! (“Syndication Properties”). “Syndication Partner” means a third party with whom Yahoo! has contracted to provide algorithmic search services or paid search services.

Subject to certain specified restrictions, Yahoo! will have full flexibility with respect to the user experience, content and look and feel on all of its web pages, and will also be entitled to use the paid search services and algorithmic search services for non-internet search queries with minimal restriction . . .

Microsoft’s mapping services and mobile search services. Yahoo! may implement each of the mapping services and the mobile search services on a non-exclusive or an exclusive basis. Yahoo! also has the option to work with Microsoft to implement the services on other platforms. If Yahoo! elects to receive services for other platforms, it must receive such services on an exclusive basis.

Revenue Share Payments and Other Payments

During the first five years of the Term, Yahoo! will be entitled to receive 88% of the net revenues generated from Microsoft’s services on Yahoo! Properties (the “Revenue Share Rate”). Yahoo! will also be entitled to receive its share (at the Revenue Share Rate) of the net revenues generated on Syndication Properties after the Syndication Partner’s share of net revenues is deducted. For new Syndication Properties during the Term, and for all Syndication Properties after the first five years of the Term, Yahoo! will receive its share (at the Revenue Share Rate) of the net revenues generated from Microsoft’s services on Syndication Properties after the Syndication Partner’s share of net revenues and certain Microsoft costs are deducted.

On the fifth anniversary of the Commencement Date, Microsoft will have the option to terminate Yahoo!’s sales exclusivity for premium search advertisers. If Microsoft exercises its option, the Revenue Share Rate will increase to 93% for the remainder of the Term, unless Yahoo! exercises its option to retain its sales exclusivity, in which case the Revenue Share Rate would be reduced to 83% for the remainder of the Term. If Microsoft does not exercise such option, the Revenue Share Rate will be 90% for the remainder of the Term.

Microsoft will also pay Yahoo! a payment of $50 million annually during the first three (3) years of the Search Agreement. Yahoo! may use these payments to partially cover transition and implementation costs not otherwise covered under the Search Agreement.

Termination Provisions

Yahoo! may terminate the Search Agreement if the trailing 12-month average of the RPS in the United States (the “U.S. RPS”) of Yahoo! and Microsoft’s combined queries falls below a specified percentage of Google Inc.’s (“Google”) estimated RPS measured on a comparable basis or if the combined Yahoo! and Microsoft query market share in the United States falls below a specified percentage; (d) on the fifth anniversary of the Search Agreement, and any time thereafter, Yahoo! has the right to terminate the Search Agreement if the trailing 12-month average of Yahoo!’s U.S. RPS is less than a specified percentage of Google’s estimated RPS; or (e) subject to exceptions, either party may terminate if a law, regulation or order would have a significant, adverse impact on a primary aspect of such party’s intended benefit of the Search Agreement.

Transition and Implementation Plan

Microsoft will hire not less than 400 Yahoo! employees (the “Transferred Employees”) and will offer the Transferred Employees market competitive compensation packages. In addition, Yahoo! and Microsoft will mutually agree on a retention plan to be paid for by Microsoft to assist in retaining the Transferred Employees and an additional 150 Yahoo! employees to be mutually agreed upon between Microsoft and Yahoo! to assist with providing the transition services.

The deal seems broader than the “web, image and video” search scope we heard before. Yahoo can terminate the deal if certain targets aren’t meet surrounding revenue per search, benchmarked to Google. At the five year mark the parties can change who runs “premium sales.” The rev share percentages change accordingly.

On a related note, there’s an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that argues these terms give Redmond a bigger win than Yahoo in Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s “win-win” scenario but that, in the larger scheme of things, Google may have already won the game:

The deal is a clear win for Microsoft and a qualified win for Yahoo. The big question is whether it makes any difference in the only contest that really matters, which is the one with Google. The risk for both Microsoft and Yahoo is that the contest is already over. Second place won’t really matter, especially as the competition shifts to Microsoft’s home turf: operating systems.

Related coverage:

• It’s Finally Official, Microsoft & Yahoo Make A Deal, Yahoo Gives Up On Search
• Live Blogging The MSFT – YHOO Search Press Conference
• Microsoft-Yahoo Deals 2008 & 2009, Side-By-Side
• A Search Eulogy For Yahoo
• Micro-Hoo Details: Q&A With Mehdi & Schneider
• The Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal, In Simple Terms

Well, in the long run, it’s probably a good thing for most of the players involved, including users. My original concern when rumors of Microhoo started to fly was the distraction that the integration of two very different and somewhat challenging cultures would become. I was afraid that the search user experience would get lost in the process. But the revenue share split does away with that concern, which is good for users. Yahoo can continue to be Yahoo, minus the “distraction” of search. Microsoft can get serious about search with a more viable economic engine to justify their investment. Basically, the deal gives Microsoft a whole lot more eyeballs for Bing, and that’s going to be beneficial for everyone.

But there are some other reasons why the search user could benefit from this deal:

A release of talent

There’s a whole bunch of PO’d, disenfranchised search engineers that have just had a frightening but potentially liberating view of the future: freed from the shackles of the rapidly sinking S.S. Yahoo, they might actually have a chance to do something meaningful in search.

I’ve had the opportunity to talk to various members of the Yahoo! search team over the last several years, under Semel, Yang and Bartz. The underlying current was always one of thinly veiled frustration. They deserved better. They were smart and, once upon a time, passionate about search. But for the past several years they were left hanging out there, blowing in the breeze. They yearned to do something meaningful. Now, with the ladder kicked out from underneath them, they have no alternative. Whoever hasn’t already jumped ship will be forced to find new, and hopefully, more rewarding homes.

Pushing the wolves back from the door

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, or, less anachronistically, a skipping MP3 file, search needs a major shot of innovation. The dysfunctional competitive environment that we’ve had for the last few years put all the major players in a position where innovation wasn’t encourage. Specifically:

Google. As the market leader with a major marketshare, almost completely dependent on the search advertising revenue stream, it’s hard to rock that boat too vigorously. Every minor change in the search UI could have a potentially negative impact on ad clickthroughs. The dynamics of the SERP are subtle and small changes can have big impacts on behavior. Given the obsessive focus on quarterly revenue numbers by Wall Street analysts, and the macro economic impact of the recession, this was not the time to boldly screw around with your golden egg-laying goose. Google always speaks a good game when it comes to hyping their efforts to innovate in search, but come on, how different is the Google SERP now from what it was 4 years ago? How innovative have they been with AdWords?

Microsoft. Microsoft was the one who was really in a position to innovate, but despite repeated commitments to search from everyone from Gates on down for the last several years, the company’s track record has been less than stellar, to be exceedingly kind. Bing is the first sign that they’re motivated to get it right, and that’s really more of a catch up move than anything. But at least they’re in the game now. I think the biggest problem was getting alignment in the gargantuan, lumbering Microsoft corporate structure. There was a lot of left hand/right hand lack of communication from Spanky and the gang in Redmond. It’s hard to innovate when you don’t even know who’s working on what.

With Bing, Microsoft showed they can execute. Now, let’s see if they can innovate.

Yahoo. You don’t innovate on the Titanic: you just try to survive. Nuff said.

What the Microsoft-Yahoo deal does is allow Microsoft’s search champions to better sell the need to innovate within the company. They have a bigger market share, can forecast significant revenue potential and make the case for investing in rapidly upping the search experience bar.  Microsoft can afford the fluctuations that are inevitable in ad revenue as they experiment with the UI, because search is a pretty small drop in the revenue bucket. And it’s certainly not that they don’t have the resources—all they need is the corporate prioritization and alignment. This deal may just do that for them.

A bigger ad inventory

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent the signal of the true value of a Yahoo partnership when he said last December:

“We’re fully prepared to compete without any partnership with Yahoo. We don’t need to act. Would it be advantageous for both of us to make a deal? Look, the fundamental basis for doing the search deal with Yahoo has to do with critical mass in the advertising marketplace. It doesn’t have to do with technology, or any of these other things, it really is a market phenomenon. Together we would have more advertisers… which means we’d have more relevant ads on our page. We’d have higher monetization levels possible in front of us because there would be more people bidding on more key words. Most importantly, Google would have perhaps a real credible competitor sooner.”

Success in search is all about relevancy. And if ads are going to be part of the results set, those ads better be as relevant as possible. The bigger the ad inventory, the more relevant they will be.  It’s a pretty simple equation.

And ad relevance is massively important to the user experience. At Enquiro we’ve done several studies that either directly or indirectly examined the importance of ad relevance to the overall search experience. The results are abundantly clear: the better the ads, the happier the user. The deal gives Microsoft a massive increase in advertiser inventory, and that’s perhaps the most important asset in the deal. It doesn’t matter that Yahoo gets 88% of the revenue. That’s short term thinking.  This is about running all those ads through the Microsoft platform, giving them the ability to control quality, targeting and relevance. The goal is gaining market share, and you need the highest quality ads possible to do that.

A stronger commitment from advertisers

No longer is an ad buy on Microsoft tossing them a bone out of guilt or a gesture of protest against a Google monopoly. With a combined market share pushing 30 points, that’s a serious slice of available eyeballs. Microsoft just became a mandatory buy. That allows them to build stronger relationships with advertisers, getting a more serious commitment in return. If Microsoft can pull the pieces of AdCenter together like they did with Bing, they’ll have a pretty powerful ad management platform. And Microsoft doesn’t suffer from the same passive-aggressive relationship with marketers that still lingers in the halls of the Googleplex. Advertisers look at Google with a mixture of resignation, fear and resentment. More than a few will willing fall into Microsoft’s embrace, now that there’s a justifiable reason to do so.

How does this help the user? Happy advertisers mean happy corporate execs up in Redmond, which means more of an appetite for innovation. Expect Microsoft to be more innovative in offering sponsored search formats. And happy advertisers also means more relevant ads (see my previous point).

More serious competition for Google

This deal sends a signal Google can’t ignore. They’re still in the search driver’s seat, but at least now they can see someone in their rearview mirror. If Microsoft can adopt a passion for innovation and push the envelope, Google will have to respond in kind. The search experience will evolve more rapidly, hopefully kicked out of the revenue obsessed stasis that it’s currently in. Stagnation benefits no one except the analysts and bean counters who insist that quarter over quarter performance is the only metric that matters. We’re way too early in the game to be that cautious and boring.

Will the Microsoft-Yahoo deal break the Google habit? No. In fact, Google will probably net a couple more percentage points out of this in the short term. But this lays the foundation of a more competitive market place, which can’t help but benefit users.

The deal puts Microsoft in the game. Now, let’s see what they do with the opportunity.

This is more good news from the search industry showing that venture capital companies are still investing in search marketing firms. Yesterday, we reported that Marin software raised $13 million and today, Conductor raised $10 million.

Here are statements from the release:

“We see persistent demand from large organizations to invest in SEO. However, lacking the tools to manage and measure that investment, many large organizations are effectively inactive in natural search and miss out on significant opportunities to grow their businesses,” said Nick Beim, a General Partner with Matrix Partners. “Conductor has demonstrated considerable success in improving the metrics and transparency of natural search.”

“Matrix and FirstMark bring important industry expertise, support and extensive networks that will enable Conductor to continue giving our customers insight into their natural search efforts,” said Seth Besmertnik, CEO of Conductor. “We look forward to continuously adding significant value to our customers by closing the loop for their natural search marketing efforts.”

Marin reportedly manages $300 million of online ad spend annually for clients such as ZipRealty and Microsoft’s Razorfish.

It is nice to see companies in the search field still able to raise money in these slow economic times.

The big loser in all of this might not be Google. PaidContent.org reports that Rambler, one of the big Russian portals, will be letting their CEO go after seeing their market share drop from 14.9 percent last year to just 6.4 percent. The CEO’s departure might be a signal that Google may not follow through on the Begun purchase, where Google would buy Rambler’s contextual ad service for $140 million.

In August of last year, Google renewed their deal with Mozilla to be the default search provider in Firefox. When Google came out with their browser, Chrome, it may have ruffled some feathers.

You can read all the news at Techmeme and also make sure to check out Danny’s write up on Summize named Summize Gains “Local” Twitter Search Option.