AOL announced Tuesday it has reached an agreement to acquire TACODA, an online behavioral targeting adverting network. TACODA will operate as a wholly-owned AOL’s subsidiary. This buyout is estimated around $275 million value.

Established in 2001 and based in New York, TACODA has about 1,000 employees. The network provides advanced technology that allows advertisers to have relevant ads and target customers based on tracking online users’ behaviours. TACODA’s technology will enable AOL to extend its targeting capabilities to both advertisers and publishers.

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The first ever Welsh-language newspaper, Y Byd, will launch next March, and is confident it will be successful.

Ned Thomas, a former Times journalist, is the force behind the publication, and has said there has never been a better time to start a Welsh newspaper.

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The Bancroft family has heard arguments for and against the sale of Dow Jones & Company to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation yesterday, and in the next several days will tell their lawyers where they stand on the issue, so that results can be tallied up.

The Bancroft family, which controls a majority of the voting shares, met in Boston yesterday, and has a week to make their decisions.

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As search engines try to balance between wanting to dig into users' private information to improve their businesses and the consumers' and privacy groups' concerns over the risk of leaking confidential information, the battle of search engines is changing.

Major search engine companies are now competing partially based on how well they can provide privacy policies to protect users.

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Tamedia AG and Editpress have announced they will launch a daily newspaper together in Luxembourg by the end of this year.

The newspaper, to be called LEssentiel, will target young, urban readers with spending power.

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The U.S. mobile search market is expected to be a fierce battlefield in the next few years as companies compete for the title of mobile search leader.

According to eMarkter, mobile search ad revenue in the U.S. will achieve $713.7 million, representing almost 15 percent of the total $4.7 billion mobile advertising market value.

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As of Friday evening, the editor-in-chief of the Hindustan Times will no longer work there.

Chaitanya Kalbag joined HT Media, which publishes the Times, in Sept. of 2006 after serving as managing editor of Reuters Asia.

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The Norwegian media group A-pressen may sell its stake in the country's largest circulation tabloid newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, to Grigory Beryozkin's ESN Group, it was announced Monday.

If the group sells its 25 percent stake in the newspaper and one share in its publisher, A-pressen could be on the receiving end of about $41 million, according to a report.

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More people have visited newspaper Web sites in the second quarter this year than ever before, according to new information from the Newspaper Association of America.

More than 59 million active Internet users – 37.3 percent of all Internet users – visited newspaper Web sites in the year's second quarter, 7.7 percent higher than the same period last year. Page views are also up, at about 2.7 billion page views per month in the second quarter, compared to 2.5 billion in the same period in 2006.

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The Audit Bureau of Circulations in the United Kingdom has no eminent plans to produce a single combined figure for newspaper and online readership like its American counterpart.

ABC announced last Tuesday it had approved development of the new measurement tool Audience-FAX, which will combine newspaper readership and online audience estimates into ABC circulation reports beginning in November. The figure will appear at the end of audit certificates in addition to print circulation numbers, and the combined readership total will be based on a research panel with data assembled by Scarborough Research.

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The French daily newspaper Mutations has mutated into two versions, being sold side-by-side at newsstands Monday. One version is being published by the South Media Corporation, the previous publisher of the paper, and the other by Haman Mana, its editor-in-chief until yesterday.

Sunday, the newspaper was in a single newsroom, but Monday saw journalists working in two separate newsrooms. One is at the newspaper's old headquarters under the South Media Corporation now managed by Alain Batongue, and the other is in its new quarters of Haman Mana at the Kabba Ngondo.

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The click fraud rate for online ads is increasing this year, according to a new report from Click Forensics. The click fraud rate in the second quarter this year was 15.8 percent, with a 14.1 percent rise over the same period last year and 14.8 percent increase from the first quarter this year.

Click Forensics also indicated the fraud rate within large pay-per-click networks is more serious – making up 25.6 percent of all fraudulent traffic in the second quarter, increasing 21.9 percent over the same period 2006 and 19.2 percent over the preceding quarter.

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A Maoist affiliated trade union has disrupted the distribution of The Himalayan Times and Annapurna Post Monday morning, despite Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala's assurances he would not tolerate attacks on press freedom.

According to the Times, union members forcibly took control of vehicles that were loaded with Monday's edition in Bhaispati, at Sama Printers, which prints both dailies. The Times also reported that police remained quiet spectators to the activities, and following requests, the police escorted vehicles to the main distribution at Bhugol Park.

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An Arizona judge has dismissed former U.S. Rep. Gary Condit's defamation lawsuit against weekly The Sonoran News, which said in an article the California representative lied to investigators about his relationship with a Washington intern who disappeared and was found murdered.

After 13 years in Congress, the Democrat lost his 2002 re-election when news coverage about Washington intern Chandra Levy's 2001 disappearance made national headlines. Her remains were found in a Washington park in May 2002, and Condit denied he had anything to do with her disappearance or death.

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Macau has the highest mobile penetration in the world, according to a new study.

“2007 Asia - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband in Hong Kong and Macau” by Research and Markets has found that although Macau had a fixed line saturation a little over 35 percent a few years ago, the mobile penetration has already reached 137 percent, making it the highest penetrated in the world.

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Global Voice editor and Inmediahk.net blogger OiWan Lam is facing a 12-month imprisonment or HK$400,000 fine for posting and linking to images which authorities consider “indecent.”

Lam is protesting the standard the government has to determine obscenity by publishing the art photograph and articles. Flickr, where Lam linked the images from, has limited Hong Kong users access of the Photos Lam referred, as well as other possibly obscene images.

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A dozen officials from Beijing ordered the China Development Brief to stop publication July 4, and charged the editor, Nick Young, with conducting “unauthorized surveys” in contravention of the 1983 Statistics Law, Young has said in a statement.

Young said in a New York Times article that the publication did not conduct surveys or polls, and that the 1983 law is so vague it can be used to prohibit any type of information-gathering involving citizens.

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