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.

From the OneRiot blog post:

We’re delighted to announce that OneRiot has been acquired by Walmart.

The OneRiot team will now be joining @Walmartlabs – Walmart’s hub for the creation of new technologies and business models integrating social, mobile and retail for the next-generation of e-commerce.

And from the WalmartLabs post:

A few weeks ago, a small team from @WalmartLabs visited the offices of OneRiot in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. OneRiot has developed some pretty nifty technology that analyzes social media signals from popular networks like Twitter and Facebook to deliver ads that are relevant to consumers’ interests. As our teams debated the finer points of Big Data, Fast Data, and machine learning technologies, it became clear to us that we could find no better colleagues than the guys at OneRiot.

As a part of Walmart, we’re continuing to work with the intensity of a technology startup. Today I’m pumped to share the news that, within 30 days of that first meeting, we have closed a transaction to acquire the key assets of OneRiot. The technology team at OneRiot will move to Silicon Valley and become part of @WalmartLabs in September.

As I have written before, here at @WalmartLabs we’re doing some amazingly interesting and impactful work at the intersection of social, mobile, and retail. The technology at the core of what we do is the Social Genome, which enables us to connect millions of consumers with the best products based on their interests at any given moment. The OneRiot technology will enrich the Social Genome, and the OneRiot team adds to the already deep expertise we have around social data analysis.

In April, Walmart acquired the Kosmix search engine for WalmartLabs: Walmart Buys Former Search Engine Kosmix To Power Social & Mobile Shopping.

The acquisition allows RKG to continue expanding its service lineup. Long established as a leader in paid search marketing, RKG has recently added services such as shopping engine management, social media advertising and display advertising. Today’s acquisition adds a highly-regarded SEO team to RKG’s offerings.

You may recognize both company names because their principals are both regular columnists here at Search Engine Land. George Michie, RKG’s co-founder and CEO, writes for our Paid Search column. Adam Audette, president of AudetteMedia, writes in our Industrial Strength column.

All employees of AudetteMedia join the RKG staff. The Bend office will remain open as RKG’s West Coast home base.

Jingle’s 800-Free-411 competed with GOOG-411, which was closed down last year, and Microsoft’s Bing-411, which is still operating. However Jingle was the leader in the “free directory assistance” segment.

At one point I called free-DA “local-mobile search for the rest of us.” That was before the dramatic growth of smartphones, which have continued to erode traditional DA call volumes.

Marchex has evolved its business over time to focus on calls and has built a call-based ad network that spans traditional media, online and mobile. The company services national clients and small businesses through partners that include Canada’s Yellow Media/Yellow Pages Group, AT&T Interactive and Skype. Marchex also offers call analytics and several other products such as reputation management.

Jingle’s revenues for 2011 are estimated to be $26 million.

Postscript: Here’s a statement from Pete Christothoulou, Marchex COO:

They do own 1-800-Free411, but that is not the reason we acquired them (in fact, this is a declining minority of their total call volume).  There are many reasons for the acquisition, but the core rationale for the acquisition was:  1) mobile voice search is an important product for our call advertising network and we could own that core IP and market leadership position; 2) Jingle has strong mobile partnerships with both carriers and mobile network operators; and 3) Jingle has growing, high-quality call volume in an important digital media channel, mobile.  For these reasons, we wanted to combine their business into our Call Advertising Network and accelerate our strategy and increase our scale and effectiveness.

Related Entries

• GOOG-411 Winds Down, Bing-411 Parties On
• AdWords And Google Voice Hook Up To Form “AdWords Call Metrics”
• Billboard Showdown: Google 411 Takes On Ask’s Algorithm
• Microsoft’s Tellme Offers Improved Mobile Voice Search Experience
• TellMe To Launch New Mobile Local Search

“This is a great outcome for our shareholders,” said Bob Rosenschein, Founder, Chairman and CEO. “After an exciting six years as a public company, we are very pleased to achieve considerable value for our investors. The acquisition price of $10.50 per share represents a significant cash premium of approximately 33% over our 90-day volume-weighted average closing stock price.”

Mr. Rosenschein continued, “This agreement is also a positive for our community members. The integrity and commitment of our company to our products remain unchanged, as we continue our mission of creating the ultimate destination for answers.”

Personally, I wanted to wish a huge congratulations to the Answers.com team!

For the full press release click here.

Postscript: BusinessInsider reports Answers.com shareholders are going to try to prevent the deal from happening.

A source close to Outboard investments, which owns 9.2% of the company, told us, “There’s not a shot in the world this thing is going through. This is going up for auction or it’s not going down.”

Says a principle: “We got this news this morning with our cornflakes – on Yahoo. The company gave no indication that it was anywhere near making a deal with anybody or that it was even shopping it around.”

“We’re not agreeing to anything at this stage. We’re waiting for the fourth quarter outcome. All we’ve seen is less than bare bones. Our expectation is that on reflection, the board will reconsider and look for signifinantly higher price.”

Related Stories:

• Answers.com Loses “Pole Position” To Google Dictionary
• Answers.com To Buy Dictionary.com For $100 Million
• Answers.com Loses Significant Google Traffic Despite Google Definition Links
• Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”

As explained in today’s announcement, Mediative will provide digital marketing services for national agencies and advertisers in Canada. YPG has also acquired two other Canadian advertising/marketing companies, Ad Splash Media and UPTREND Media.

Enquiro is perhaps most well-known for its eye tracking studies that, for years, have educated the search marketing industry about how searchers interact with a search results page. The company was founded in 1999 as SearchEnginePosition.com. Enquiro CEO Gord Hotchkiss is a longtime Search Engine Land columnist.

Demand Media has filed for an IPO. The company, known as a content farm to some, produces much of its content on sites like eHow and others in direct response to what it determines people are searching for on the web. Its filing shed new light on how much it depends on SEO and Google, in particular. That’s interesting, because I’ve never known a company — a publisher — so dependent on SEO (outside of actual SEO companies) to go public before. Below, highlights on these aspects.

The SEO and Google aspects really get going around page 14 of the filing:

Page 14: Google Funds Big Chunk Of Demand Media

We have an extensive relationship with Google and a significant portion of our revenue is derived from cost-per-click performance-based advertising provided by Google. For the year ended December 31, 2009 and the six months ended June 30, 2010, we derived approximately 18% and 26%, respectively, of our total revenue from our various advertising arrangements with Google.

Got that? Demand Media currently gets more than 1/4 of its income from Google ads, 26% for the current year through June 30, up from 18% in 2009. This section goes on to outline the risk that Google could terminate those agreements or not generate as much revenue as it current does for them. Sure, but unlikely, I’d say. Then again, changes like this did undermine Geosign. The Financial Post has a long story about this, which I can’t find on its site but which you can read archived here)

Page 18: The Importance (And Risk) Of SEO

Another method we employ to attract and acquire new, and retain existing, users and customers is commonly referred to as search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO involves developing websites to rank well in search engine results.

Our ability to successfully manage SEO efforts across our owned and operated websites and our customer websites is dependent on the timely modification of SEO efforts from time to time in response to periodic changes in search engine algorithms, search query trends and related efforts by providers of search services designed to ensure the display of unique offerings in search results.

Our failure to successfully manage our SEO strategy could result in a substantial decrease in traffic to our owned and operated websites and to our customer websites through which we distribute our content, which would result in substantial decreases in conversion rates and repeat business, as well as increased costs if we were to replace free traffic with paid traffic. Any or all of these results would adversely affect our business, revenue, financial condition and results of operations.

If you’re not familiar with SEO, our What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? page provides a short primer. As the filing describes, it’s the practice of generating traffic from search engines for free, akin to public relations (versus advertising).

As with public relations, good SEO can increase the odds of generating traffic, but that’s not guaranteed. This is a major risk factor, as the filing gets into more.

Page 18: Search Sends Nearly 40% Of Traffic; Google Alone, 26% Or More

We depend in part on various Internet search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines to direct a significant amount of traffic to our owned and operated websites. For the quarter ended June 30, 2010, approximately 40% of the page view traffic directed to our owned and operated websites came directly from these Internet search engines (and a majority of the traffic from search engines came from Google), according to our internal data.

So Demand Media gets about 40% of its traffic for free, most of which comes from Google. How much from Google? That’s not said.

Google’s generally estimated to have a 65% share of the search market in the US, which means using that figure, Demand Media gets about 26% of its traffic from Google. However, site operators routinely report that they receive 80% or more of their search-related traffic from Google. That would put Demand’s traffic from Google closer to the 32% mark.

Page 19: Traffic Is Vulnerable To Algorithm Changes

Our ability to maintain the number of visitors directed to our owned and operated websites and to our customers’ websites through which we distribute our content by search engines is not entirely within our control. For example, search engines frequently revise their algorithms in an attempt to optimize their search result listings.

Changes in the methodologies used by search engines to display results could cause our owned and operated websites or our customer websites to receive less favorable placements, which could reduce the number of users who link to our owned and operated websites and to our customers’ websites from these search engines.

Some of our owned and operated websites and our customers’ websites have experienced fluctuations in search result rankings and we anticipate similar fluctuations in the future. Internet search engines could decide that content on our owned and operated websites and on our customers’ websites, including content that is created by our freelance content creators, is unacceptable or violates their corporate policies.

Any reduction in the number of users directed to our owned and operated websites and to our customers’ websites would negatively affect our ability to earn revenue. If traffic on our owned and operated websites and on our customers’ websites declines, we may need to resort to more costly sources to replace lost traffic, and such increased expense could adversely affect our business, revenue, financial condition and results of operations.

This is the key section to me, and I’m glad to see it’s included. As I said, we’ve never had a company that I’ve known of go public with a business model that’s so dependent on gaining traffic from search, in particular from Google.

To date, Google’s shown no heavy signs of putting a crackdown on “content farms.” However, there’s no lack of public attention about companies like Demand Media and ample criticisms that they seem to walk all over Google, ranking for whatever they want, with low quality content. The IPO even speaks to this on page 20:

Perception that the quality of our content may not be the same or better than that of other published Internet content, even though baseless, can damage our reputation. We are frequently the subject of unflattering reports in the media about our business and our model.

It’s not all baseless criticism, but neither is it all true. Plenty of content from Demand Media and its brethren is good and helpful. But plenty of it can also be substandard (just as there’s plenty of substandard content outside content farms).

As Google continues to come under pressure about these concerns (here’s just one of many examples), I think it’s likely we’ll see them institute an algorithm change to further weed-out low quality content. By algorithm change, I mean a change to Google’s computer “algorithm” recipe that’s used to sift through all the pages it has collected and decide which are the best to list.

That might have an impact on Demand, just as it might have an impact on publishers all over the web, large and small. But because Demand seems so much more dependent on Google than many other publishers, the risk is much higher.

The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, did address content farms tangentially when discussing Google’s “MayDay” algorithm change recently at our SMX Advanced search marketing conference. From his talk:

Mayday is about looking at the state of web content in 2010 and what signals do we use to differentiate between quality and, for example, content farms. He says people affected by this update should step back and look at how much content they’re generating and how close does it come to being spam.

Amit Singhal, who oversees Google’s ranking algorithms, was also asked about content farms in a Financial Times article recently. But he didn’t specifically say they’d receive any special attention. From the article:

“If there is an information gap out there and someone fills that gap, it’s good for the world,” says Amit Singhal, the Google engineer responsible for its ranking algorithm

Bottom line? My gut says that when your business model is all about making money off Google for free, rather than making money by publishing content that taps into Google as a side benefit, you show up on the radar of Google’s search quality team as a potential threat requiring close attention. That doesn’t mean you get shot down, but one of the best ways to avoid trouble at all is to stay off the radar in the first place.

Page 21: Mining Search Data

We collect data regarding consumer search queries from a variety of sources. When a user accesses one of our owned and operated websites, we may have access to certain data associated with the source and specific nature of the visit to our website. We also license consumer search query data from third parties. Our Content & Media algorithms utilize this data to help us determine what content consumers are seeking, if that content is valuable to advertisers and whether we can cost-effectively produce this content. These third-party consumer search data agreements are generally for perpetual licenses of a discrete amount of data and generally do not provide for updates of the data licensed.

There are a number of keyword research tools, such as those from Google, that allow mining of what people are searching for. However, it is far more effective if you have access to an entire database of search activity, so that you can do direct research. Demand Media has access to some tools like these (places like Hitwise and comScore both provide such databases). I’m a little surprised the exact sources aren’t named, as that’s a potential risk factor — knowing the exact sources helps you judge the quality.

Page 24 & 25: The Domaining Aspect

A number of our owned and operated websites and our network of customer websites are undeveloped or minimally developed properties that primarily contain advertising listings and links.

Our success depends in large part on our customers’ renewals of their domain name registrations. Domain name registrations represented approximately 41% of total revenue in the year ended December 31, 2009, and approximately 37% of our total revenue in the six months ended June 30, 2010. Our customer renewal rate for expiring domain name registrations was approximately 69% in the year ended December 31, 2009, and approximately 73% in the six months ended June 30, 2010.

What I’d say is a lesser known aspect to Demand Media is that it generates income by populating web sites that lack content with ads, an activity that falls within the broad area of “domaining.” It’s not search but related at least in that Google also provides ads to these types of sites, through its AdSense For Domains program.

For example, consider this page at bankofelgin.com and the next page you get, if you click on the “online checking” link:

This isn’t the Bank Of Elgin, which does exist but at bankofelgin.net. Perhaps that bank once also owned the .com domain, as I can see it there back in 2006. But it’s not there now

The Demand Media connection? Well, about two weeks ago, visitors to that site got a different message:

Hi There! bankofelgin.com isn’t available, but you’re still in a good place — ehow.com. We think we might have what you’re looking for.

And were sent to a page at Demand Media’s eHow site that shows this:

Gabriel Weinberg, who runs the DuckDuckGo search engine, noticed this about two weeks ago and was pretty certain that Demand Media was controlling this domain. Perhaps, or it could be that Demand Media was buying traffic to its site in this way.

Soon after Weinberg’s post, the site was changed. It now carries ads provided by Yahoo, as best I can tell. I can’t tell if Demand Media operates the site or not.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with domaining. There are rules against “cybersquatting,” making money off domains that are trademarks of others, and Demand Media’s IPO speaks to this. But if SEO is a competitive space, I’d say domaining is even more so

About That Quality Content

Finally, look again at that page above, at the first two articles in the first column and the first in the second column. The titles:

1. How to Apply for a Credit Card Online
2. How to Apply Online for Credit Cards
3. How to Apply for a Credit Card Online

Three different articles on exactly the same topic? And the first and third have exactly the same title? One article on this topic is sufficient.

eHow has the first two different articles because it’s going after different search terms, “apply for credit card online” with the first and “apply online for credit cards” with the second.

The pages are different from each other in writing, just as is the third page. But there’s no reason for the content to be different from a reader standpoint. The sole reason, as best I can tell, for all these variations is simply to pull in more traffic from Google — which potentially is a Google quality violation. More important, it’s this type of thing that doesn’t help Demand Media’s push that it is more than just a content farm.

For related news on the IPO and other analysis, see Techmeme and Mediagazer.

The companies coming together are 10e20, Search & Social, Brent Csutoras Inc., and SecondStep Search. In a blog post announcing the merger, BlueGlass CMO Chris Winfield says that the companies had already been referring work amongst themselves for years.

A news release about the merger says that, in addition to offering client services, BlueGlass also plans to offer free and subscription-based marketing tools.

With the merger, BlueGlass Interactive says it now has offices in four cities and 40 employees, plus combined annual billings of $10 million.

The acquisition is partly about bolstering the digital marketing assets and sophistication of Hearst’s various traditional media businesses, which include magazines, TV stations and newspapers. According to the press release put out this morning:

The acquisition gives Hearst extensive global digital marketing capabilities, including paid search, search engine optimization, Web development, mobile and social marketing, and data analytics.

And according to the WSJ’s article iCrossing will continue to operate as a stand-alone business and presumably service SEM clients of all types. Here’s what iCrossing CEO Don Scales said to us in answer to a question about whether there are any concerns about being able to continue to service other, non-Hearst clients:

iCrossing has no concerns whatsoever; we will grow to meet demand. Hearst’s No. 1 commitment is to support the independent growth of iCrossing, ensuring our continued success at connecting brands with customers and providing measurable ROI through digital channels. Hearst’s status as one of the largest, private global media companies puts them in position to aggressively invest in our services, technology, and people.

On the other side of the country Marin Software announced that it had raised an $11.2 million Series D round. That brings to total raised to date to just over $33 million. The company will use the money to continue to invest in its platform and to expand further outside the US. Marin competes with other SEM platform providers like Kenshoo and to a lesser degree Clickable.

Under the deal, which is in the final stages of negotiations, iCrossing, one of the nation’s biggest independent digital-marketing shops, is likely to fetch about $375 million, plus bonus payments if it reaches certain targets, these people said.

The article goes on to discuss how publishers may be trying to take digital marketing in-house rather than relying as much on traditional agencies. And it says the deal could still fall apart.

A few years ago a number of SEM firms were acquired by larger advertising holding companies. For example, in 2004 iProspect was acquired by UK-based Aegis Group for a reported $50 million and in 2007 Reprise Media was bought by Interpublic Group.

There are many high profile search and digital agencies that remain independent. If the Hearst deal goes through it could trigger similar acquisitions by other publishers seeking to have more control over search/digital marketing in house.