No deal terms were announced. It’s understood Data Explorers owner Bowmark Capital had been looking to sell the firm for the last year.

The company claims to track more than 85 percent of global securities transactions.

Markit wants to inject Data Explorers’ services in to its own, including adding new services for exchange securities, dividend forecasting and quantitative research.

London-based Data Explorers says it quadrupled revenue and tripled profitability over the last four years with global expansion.

Market also acquired Wall Street On Demand, which provides visualisations for financial data, in 2010.

The group sold its French medical publishing business plus its UK titles for farmers, doctors, music industry professionals, publicans and others for a combined £25 million through last year.

“The strategy is to grow in events and in emerging markets,” says Levin, who also spent up to £71 million on eight, mostly event-related acquisitions last year.

“We’re exiting orphaned bits of content not related to other endeavours. But we’re not particularly looking for more content disposals at this juncture; we’re substantially through that.

“We’ve sold good businesses like Farmers’ Guardian, which is super-good but unrelated to our view of how we can use media to span the world. We traded out of that and in to the Malaysian Furniture Fair.”

2011 operating profit rose 17.5 percent on nine percent higher revenue of £972 million, the company reported on Tuesday.

Following some of the print disposals and online expansion, UBM expects its Marketing & Services division will in 2012 see online revenue overtake print for the first time. Last year, the magazine disposals meant revenue dipped by six percent – but this year the company expects it to grow by two to four percent, driven by double-digit online growth spurred by its technology line-up including TechWeb and TechInsights.

A former Symbian CEO, Levin speaks fondly of the mobile and tablet opportunity.

“It’s hardwired at a personal level in to myself,” he says. “We’ve got platform-agnostic HTML 5 developments, we need to cater for demand.

“And you’ll see more launches at our trade show level, with mobile guides so that people at an event can participate more fully and we can deliver more content to people which is time-sensitive and relevant.”

Levin says UBM’s PRNewswire has been rejuvenated by social media. Company earnings announcements, on which it used to trade most prominently, are now less than a fifth of all the press releases it distributes, while its enhanced social media releases, including video and social network links, are 23 percent of the total, spurred by fanning out in to a network of over 7,000 partner sites.

“PRNewswire now has a Google (NSDQ: GOOG) PageRank of eight – which is on a level with The Guardian or MTV or Digg,” Levin says.

Release | Slides | Webcast

• New Media Age and The Lawyer publisher Centaur says digital revenue rose 10 percent in the second half of last year to make up 32 percent of company revenue (£8.5 million). (Release).
• Meanwhile, Lloyd’s List and Datamonitor operator Informa says 2011 digital revenue rose to be 74 percent of its total. (Release).

Centaur’s online odyssey is fresher than Informa’s. It recently closed several printed titles, including that of New Media Age, to try tipping its business balance toward online and events. Part of that journey involves online acquisitions, the most recent of which was Profile Group this week for £8 million.

Informa says it will this year begin delivering its book catalogue through Taylor & Francis Online. That was the online platform it introduced in 2011 to delivery its over 1,600 academic journals.

Informa’s e-book sales rose 11 percent last year to make up 12 percent of academic book sales Informa’s book portfolio also includes the Routledge publisher.

“E-book delivery, as well as the increasing use of print on demand services and online marketing of back catalogues, has been a significant driver in improving the quality of the books business,” the company says.

But digital isn’t yet improving the profits of either company. Informa’s annual profit crashed by a quarter to £74.3 million, while Centaur slimmed its half-year loss by £100,000 to £1.5 million.

Centaur revenue fell whilst Informa’s rose.

Over 4,000 researchers have signed a petition against Elsevier practices including charging libraries for bundles of journals rather than individual titles.

They also object to Elsevier’s apparent stance on the U.S. bills SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, which critics say would restrict access to taxpayer-funded academic research.

The protest is currently small in the context of the world’s large researcher community, but is causing Elsevier’s business model to come under the knife.

“We think that investors should ask management of Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) how a PR incident of this kind could happen, why crisis management has been so tentative and what other steps management intends to take the handle the protest,” says Bernstein Research European media analyst Claudio Aspesi, in a note titled “Occupy Elsevier”.

“Dropping prices, abandoning the subscription model or the bundles would all impact the economics substantially, at least for some years. So the company can only hope that the controversy will die down in time”

Aspesi thinks Elsevier’s Anglo-Dutch owner Reed Elsevier, whose Reed Business Information is still shedding titles after Reed failed to sell RBI during the downturn, should be broken up, and is pessimistic about the company.

“Our scepticism is based on the expectation that academic libraries will increasingly push back and request lower price increases than in the past, threatening to abandon ‘Big
Deal’ contracts if the company does not lower its expectations for revenue growth,” Aspesi writes.

Polar also today released some numbers that attests to the growth of the apps economy — and to its own business. It says that it currently works with some 380 media brands in 12 countries. It has served 1.6 billion page views for some 11 million users to-date across the many apps that it has produced.

The $6 million round was led by Georgian Partners and takes the total invested in the company to $9 million, with the previous $3 million coming from private investors.

Georgian, which based in Toronto like Polar, has a portfolio that includes another app developer, Kony Solutions, as well as a number of other platform-based B2B digital media startups. (Two others include Shopify and Terapeak, which are used by retail e-commerce companies.)

Meanwhile, the new product line, branded MediaEverywhere, effectively does what it says on the label: it is HTML-5 based and is aimed at letting publishers make apps that can get used on different platforms and devices — not just mobiles and tablets but also desktop computers, and not just native apps but web browsers, too.

Working across different platforms is a trend we’ve seem among other app developers — but given the client line-up that Polar already has, this is a significant sign of how that kind of strategic view is taking shape among publishers investing in apps. Research from GfK last year showed that some 11 percent of magazine views are now digital-only — a number that is on the rise, with publishers all making sure that they will be along for the ride.

It’s worth pointing out that Polar already offered a degree of cross-platform development before today: its SmartTM product lets content be formatted for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, PlayBook, Windows Phone and Nokia’s Symbian platform; however now web apps are being added into the mix.

Kunal Gupta, the CEO of Polar, tells paidContent that is has some publishers already on the platform but is not announcing any client names just yet.

Some publishers — notably the FT — are buying up/bringing in-house their third-party developers in order to have a better grip on how they develop their apps, and to make sure that they continue to have an edge on their competitors. That presents an interesting challenge for a third-party company like Polar: will it, too, eventually get swallowed up by one of its customers, or will it find it hard in the longer term to attract business from the big-name publishers who will continue to invest in having that expertise in-house?

Gupta tells paidContent that the company is more than happy to stay independent for now.

Two separate sources close to the situation told paidContent that Greg Stern, VP at AllBusiness, yesterday sent an email out to its freelancers, telling them that it was “evaluating its strategic options” for AllBusiness.com. It further said it would “no longer be accepting blog postings and other editorial contributions” and that any contracts they had with the company were terminated. They were also requested to file invoices as soon as possible for work that had been commissioned. The full text of the email is below.

Both sources also said that editorial staff were getting laid off. Their last day will be this Friday.

We have reached out to a spokesperson from D&B to confirm all of this and to get more detail on what those “strategic options” might be. We will update the story as we learn more.

Update: No response yet from D&B, but Peter Horan, once CEO of AllBusiness.com before it was sold to D&B, tweeted that Allbusiness was in an active sale process. “Non media companies like the idea of media more than they like media business,” he also wrote. “[Allbusiness] has great team and great tech.” Also: two other possible traffic figures from the site, from Quantcast (505,000); and a commenter on this post, who cites Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Display Network’s recent numbers as 1.3 million uniques.

Update 2: A D&B spokesperson has confirmed that the company is evaluating strategic options for AllBusiness.com, without elaborating further. [original article continues below]

In terms of the traffic on AllBusiness.com, the numbers one finds online vary greatly: a note from the company’s regional sales manager in Texas on LinkedIn notes that the company has “3 million+” monthly unique visitors; Compete says monthly visitors are close to 581,000 in November 2011, and dropping. Links on AllBusiness.com’s “about” page to advertise on the site go directly to the homepage for D&B.

Nor is it clear how well AllBusiness is doing financially. D&B noted in its last quarterly results(Q3 2011) that its Internet Solutions division — which includes AllBusiness, the financial information site Hoovers and the web portal for DNB.com’s portfolio of services — grew revenues by eight percent over the same quarter a year ago, to $31.5 million. Total company revenues were $439.4 million, meaning that Internet Solutions represented only about seven percent of overall sales.

AllBusiness has had a rollercoaster of a ride in the world of online media: started in 1999, the site got bought by NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) Internet for an eye-watering $225 million in 2000, before then getting taken private. It was eventually sold to D&B for $55 million in 2007.

Always a promising idea — news focussed on the small-business world — that perhaps proved challenging in long-term business execution, ultimately ending up with a company for which AllBusiness’ main currency, content, was not core enough.

The letter to contributors:

Thank you for being a valued contributor to AllBusiness.com.

I am writing to let you know that D&B is evaluating its strategic options for AllBusiness.com. During that process, we will not be accepting blog postings and other editorial contributions.

Therefore, we are asking you to please cease work on AllBusiness.com projects and submit an invoice for all outstanding payments as soon as possible. Specific assignments already in progress do not need to be completed, but should be included in the invoice.

Please note that this letter will serve as notice that your contract with D&B is being terminated.

Thank you again. We have a tremendous appreciation of all your contributions and support in helping to make AllBusiness.com the Web’s premier small business resource.

CEB paid nearly $58.9 million for Information Technology Toolbox, Inc. in 2007 when it had roughly 1 million registered users.

As of today, the site, founded in 1998, will be part of Ziff Davis B2B Focus, formed earlier this year when ZD picked up Focus Research; Focus provides lead gen for IT pros and research for enterprise buyers. This time last year Ziff Davis announced the acquisition of tech deals site LogicBuy and the launch of its ad targeting platform, the Ziff Davis BuyerBase.

A few stats from the report:

»  IDC moved Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color into its media tablet category, rather than classifying it as an e-reader. The company estimates B&N shipped 805,458 Nook Colors in Q3.

»  IDC estimates that e-ink e-reader shipments have increased by 165.9 percent year-on-year, with 6.5 million units shipped in Q3. Amazon’s launch of the $79 Kindle and $99 Kindle Touch with Special offers “drops these products well into the range of impulse and gift buys for many.” The United States still makes up 80 percent of the worldwide market for e-readers, IDC estimates. “Europe, the second largest market, should rise to its highest volume levels in 4Q11 due to holiday shopping, but is not growing at the expected rate due to lack of local language content and the uncertain euro zone climate,” said IDC analyst Jennifer Song.

»  IDC estimates that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) shipped 11.1 million iPads in Q3, up from 9.3 million units in Q2.

»  Overall, the company estimates that media tablet shipments rose 23.9 percent in Q3, over the previous quarter, to 18.1 million units–an increase of 264.5 percent year on year. The company projects worldwide shipments of 63.3 million units for all of 2011.

release

NetShelter says the unit, which was created in collaboration with Samsung and other select advertisers, has been running in trials for some months now. Samsung was also named as one of the flagship brands that will kick off the new service commercially.

InPowered works like this: An article on, say, connected TVs written by an “influencer” blogger on one of the blogs in the NetShelter network, say IntoMobile, might run a Samsung ad for its connected TVs. Underneath that ad, and within the ad box, there is a list of further, relevant articles for that topic from that blog, as well as another tab for articles from other blogs in the network, which includes MacRumors, 9to5Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and many others. The units also offer the option of including Facebook and Twitter feeds for the brand being advertised, and advertisers have control to “curate” which stories appear in the advertisement.

Users that click through do not leave the original site, but go to a pop-out window to view the secondary story. In that sense, the ad unit potentially benefits more than just the advertiser and the “home” blog serving the ad: it potentially helps generate revenues for the sites in the network whose articles are appearing in the ads.

The tech market could be a lucrative one for this kind of ad unit. Not only do technology-related brands and services account for a quarter of all online advertising, but readers of tech blogs tend to be information hungry and click-happy, potentially at the ready to go to a related link to see more on a subject and engage with it — and crucially to share that information with other people.

NetShelter’s CEO Peyman Nilforoush tells us that in trial mode, the service has seen some strong responses from users: more than 50 percent of readers clicked on articles in the ad unit to view further content, and one in four ended up sharing that content with others. That means that not only does the advertising brand increase its credibility for serving useful content, but its own advertising gets extended with the sharing of the article. Amplified across NetShelter’s network — according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) it is the largest tech media property with some 150 million unique users each month — if this service continues to see that kind of engagement, it could increase traffic significantly across these sites.

But display advertising is one thing; and populating one blog with content from a competitor, without editorial input from the home blogs themselves, is another. Asked how on-board the blogs themselves were with the idea of having third-party articles appearing on their pages, Nilforoush brushed the idea off as a non-concern.

“We have an exclusive partnership with our bloggers,” he said, noting that his network used the RSS feeds that are available to anybody. “These are just the summaries directing people back to the original stories.”

“Underlying revenue growth for Professional Publishers suffered from a 3-4-year “hangover” in the wake of the 2001 recession,” according to a note from the investment analyst firm. “Most names only managed to reach underlying revenue growth above the low-single-digit range (that is, above +3%) by 2005.

“We think history may be repeating itself after 2009 – for all but Pearson (NYSE: PSO). It would not seem unreasonable, in our view, to expect a similar pattern following the mid-09 trough, especially given 2010 and 2011-to-date data points.”

Bernstein says public companies in the sector – comprising Pearson, Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI), Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) and Wolters Kluwer – will see only three percent revenue growth between 2011 and 2014, compared with the 2005-2008 average of 4.8 percent.

Still, that is not particularly a horror show – growth is growth, and this de-rating is not as pronounced as, say, that recently given to the UK economy.

Bernstein reckons Reed Elsevier’s stock price could rise by up to 30 percent if management broke up the company, though it actually expects only continued pruning. But it fancies Pearson’s increasing strength in U.S. digital education services.

The firm last week poured scepticism on European media stocks, which it thinks are incapable of matching up to U.S. online rivals and are spending too much trying.