• News Corp.’s News International is ready to fight market-leading AutoTrader by launching its own website in the space.

• Mail Online publisher A&N Media last week sold the sector’s number-two player, Motors.co.uk, to Manheim Remarketing, which owns the U.S. Autotrader.com, which is unrelated to AutoTrader of the UK, for an undisclosed sum.

• AutoTrader UK owner Trader Media Group (TMG) is jointly owned by Guardian Media Group and Apax, which each this week said they were splitting their jointly-owned Emap media group in to three. GMG hopes to sell both TMG and Emap for a windfall in the future.

Trader Media Group is a case study in digital transition, having successfully moved its traditional printed Autotrader classifieds newspaper to be a search-centric digital listings business. 2010/11 profit hit £34.7 million on seven percent higher revenue.

News International wants a piece of that pie. It is recruiting for a product and content head with a “start-up mentality” to build a “premier car digital destination”.

To start this business and take share from AutoTrader, News International will need to build relationships with car dealerships as well as individual private buyers and sellers.

That won’t be easy. With 10.8 million monthly uniques at last disclosure in March 2011, AutoTrader claimed to be 16 times more popular than its nearest rival. It hosts over 6,000 dealer websites.

But News International may get to draw on its Times and Sun newspapers’ strong brands in car content; the former takes car reviews from Top Gear co-presenter Jeremy Clarkson.

Via MotorTrader.com.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media Ltd. is an investor in our parent company, Giga Omni Media.

– Guardian: Lovefilm CTO Mike Blakemore will become the news publisher’s engineering director in May, reporting to GNM digital development director Tanya Cordrey.

– Yahoo: Vizeum digital manager Mark Gilleran will head Yahoo’s Ireland sales operations, working to UK and Ireland James Wildman.

– Trinity Mirror: The news publisher is adding to its directors board Donal Smith, CEO of stock-buying analysis firm Data Explorers.

It’s a very exciting development for us, as ContentNext and GigaOM share so many of the same goals and have such similar cultures. We both believe fundamentally in the power of breaking news and smart, useful content across different platforms, and we both have a core conviction about practicing truth and fairness in our journalism. We also both happen to believe that you can build very profitable businesses if you can execute on those principles.

We have other things in common, too: Both companies’ founders — in our case, Rafat Ali, in GigaOM’s case, Om Malik — turned influential one-man blogs into vibrant media companies by being way ahead of the curve. (A side note: The two founders have also long been close friends.) The chance to work with Om is one that anyone would leap at. He is a true visionary with a unique understanding of technology and a gift for communicating that knowledge. He’s also stacked GigaOM with talented writers and editors who, like him, have a deep curiosity about the intersection of technology and business, particularly innovation. (You can read Om’s post on the sale.)

At a time when so many content companies are groping for sustainable business models, GigaOM has a dynamic approach to making money. Its multiple revenue streams extend from site advertising to conferences to subscription products and beyond; from its online audience of more than 4.5 million monthly unique visitors, to its leading events like GigaOM Structure and GigaOM Roadmap, to GigaOM Pro, which provides research on emerging technology markets from over 110 independent analysts. GigaOM has built a suite of products that can serve a variety audiences, all of which congregate under the GigaOM brand. And now that will expand to include our sites, newsletters and conferences.

For readers of ContentNext’s sites — paidContent, MocoNews, paidContent:UK and ContentSutra — there’s nothing not to like about this deal. You’ll still be able to attend our stellar conferences and enjoy our trenchant posts about the industries we cover. You’ll still be getting all the content you know from the writers that you’re used to getting it from. But now you’ll be getting something else, too: more smart voices on different and vital topics, and even more news and analysis.

Under the terms of the purchase, Guardian News & Media (GNM), which bought ContentNext Media in 2008, will take a minority stake in GigaOM. GNM joins existing GigaOM investors including Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) Ventures, Alloy Ventures and True Ventures. The sale is the culmination of a process that began back in the fall, with multiple bidders for ContentNext. The New York investment bank Coady Deimar Partners advised GNM on the deal.

“With our shared commitment to journalistic ethics, GigaOM and paidContent are a natural fit,” said Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM. “paidContent is the leading voice covering the evolution of media, an area that is very important to us. Integrating our teams will enrich our editorial coverage and expand our footprint immediately in two markets that are critical to our growth – New York City and the UK.” GigaOM, which was founded in 2006, is based in San Francisco. ContentNext, whose roots go back to 2002, is based in New York.

The sale ends ContentNext’s three-and-a-half-year run as part of Guardian News and Media. When GNM had bought ContentNext, part of the idea was that it could help the UK publisher gain mindshare in the U.S. as the Guardian expanded there. In recent months, GNM has been focusing its investment activity in the U.S. around the buildout of a new site. “paidContent has a fantastic presence in the tech/media space, and the match with GigaOM, itself a really smart and pioneering company, is a good one. We are delighted to become shareholders in GigaOM as part of the deal,” said Andrew Miller, CEO of Guardian Media Group, the parent company of GNM. “The Guardian’s focus in the U.S. is on building guardiannews.com, but we look forward to seeing paidContent thrive and grow in its new home and wish its staff all the very best for the future.”

We thank the Guardian for their stewardship, and can’t wait to start working with our new colleagues at GigaOM.

See GigaOM’sannouncement of the deal for additional details.

– Wiggin: The media law firm is taking on BBC Worldwide’s digital media and technology business and legal affairs head David Deakin to its broadcast and digital content team, starting April. Clients he will advise on digital include Virgin Media and ITV.

– Qriously: The London mobile response advertising firm is adding former Dynamic Logic exec Joe Zahtila as North America GM and creditor insurance specialist Julian Kenny as finance and operations EVP as it sets upon a U.S. expansion.

– Shine 360°: BBC Worldwide’s consumer products creative director Frances Adams is joining Shine Group’s non-broadcast rights division as its first creative director from April.

– Guardian: GNM digital marketing head Steve Wing is now becoming mobile business director, overseeing the mobile, tablet and e-reader products’ commercial, under commercial executive director Adam Freeman.

– Digitas: Online advertising veteran Simon Calvert has signed on at Digitas as worldwide head of strategic planning, based in London and reporting to Mark Beeching, worldwide chief creative and strategy officer. Previously, Calvert was global chief planning officer and executive strategy director at Draftfcb.

Free since its mid-October launch thanks to a Channel 4 sponsorship, the publisher’s newspaper-like, iOS 5-only iPad app will require a £9.99 monthly subscription from January 13.

How will it fare? Guardian News & Media claims 500,000 downloads since launch, but the real number of users is half that – the app had 280,000 active users in December, the publisher tells paidContent.

If The Guardian converts 17 percent of last month’s readers (that’s the proportion of its iPhone users who have subscribed), it could achieve 47,600 paying iPad customers, yielding about £475,000 in monthly sales, before 30 percent is given to Apple.

Half a million people have tried the app so far in three months. For new users, the conversion tactic will be free trial – they get seven days of free access before a hard-stop subscription requirement.

That is unlike The Guardian’s iPhone app, which gives all users three free stories every day before requiring a monthly subscription (£2.99 for six months, £4.99 for 12 months, free in the U.S.).

If there is a challenge to the plan, however, it is that The Guardian gives readers an easy choice to revert to using its free Guardian.co.uk website.

The attractive iPad app was designed to showcase stories from the daily newspaper. Exploring related and other articles take users out of the paid app experience and to the same website nobody pays anything for.

Guardian.co.uk is also pushing some of the same content found in the app out for free to Facebook and Tumblr, while the app lacks some of the editorial components Guardian.co.uk trades most heavily on, like live blogs.

But it is adding its Weekend supplement.

Disclosure: Our publisher ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.

Half-year profit is up by a tenth to £70.6 ($109.81) million on four percent higher revenue of £135.4 ($210.59) million.

The group has long been known as a case study in the successful transition of advertising-centric publishing to digital media. Its digital operations scored 15 percent more revenue of £96.4 ($149.94) million and account for 87 percent of profits.

CEO John King: “We have continued to grow our digital business strongly despite the current economic climate. With the Group being platform agnostic, we are benefitting from the rapid growth of a wide range of wireless devices.”

The group says 30 percent of its dealers use its premium mobile offering.

“With the majority of the group’s business now online, TMG’s strategy is to widen its range of digital products and develop a number of brand extensions … Opportunities are expanding with the growth of new digital media. Facebook and Twitter present new outlets for internet-based social marketing.”

TMG is jointly owned by Guardian Media Group and Apax Partners, the former of which plans to sell it at some point in the future.

Disclosure: Our publisher ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.

“ContentNext has strong brands, great people and an excellent reputation, but GNM’s focus in the U.S. is on building the Guardian,” GNM’s international and business development director Stella Beaumont told the staff. “We have received expressions of interest in the company, but the sale process is still in the early stages. We are talking to a select number of potential buyers.” The company is working with the bankers Coady Diemar Partners on the possible sale.

GNM acquired ContentNext, which was founded by Rafat Ali and has chronicled the digital media business for decision-makers since 2002, for an undisclosed sum in July 2008. Guardian Media Group’s then CEO Carolyn McCall said the deal would aide the publisher’s expansion in to the media and technology verticals, and assist with its U.S. ambitions.

Since then, pursuing the latter has since become GNM’s focus. GNM aborted its first attempt to build its U.S. audience,
GuardianAmerica.com, but is currently engaged in a much larger-scale U.S. build-out, GuardianNews.com. As part of that effort, GNM has moved several British editors from London to New York, and has been hiring staff in the U.S.

ContentNext has three active sites — the flagship paidContent.org, mocoNews.net and paidContent:UK.co.uk — as well as a fourth site, contentSutra.com, that doesn’t currently have its own staff. It has 16 employees and contributors, based in the U.S.and the UK. ContentNext’s audience has grown steadily since the 2008 purchase. paidContent.org’s unique users were up more than 130 percent between October 2009 and October 2011, to 639,000, while page views were up over 38 percent, to more than 1.3 million, according to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Analytics. Across the sites, uniques grew by 71 percent, to about 808,000, and page views were up 13 percent, to more than 1.67 million. ContentNext makes its money from advertising sales and conferences, including the annual namesake paidContent event, that cover topics including mobile, entertainment and advertising.

“I’m very proud of what our talented, resourceful team does every day. We’ve enjoyed working with the Guardian, and are very excited about our next chapter,” said Caryn Whitman, the chief operating officer of ContentNext. Whitman and several other senior staff are working with GNM on the sale.

“This number of downloads in a week is a fantastic achievement, and shows the appetite among our readers to access our content in new, digital ways,” says editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.

This can be considered a free trial period because the iPad edition is currently free for three months, sponsored by Channel 4. The Guardian‘s challenge in early 2012 will be to convince early free adopters to pay £9.99 a month – its heaviest digital pricepoint to date.

How will the publisher do it? As with iPhone, iPad users will attempt an inducement with freemium, but the strategy will differ. Whereas iPhone users can read three stories before having to subscribe (£2.99 for six months, £4.99 for 12 months, free in the U.S.), iPad users from January will get seven days of free access before a hard-stop subscription requirement, even those in the States.

The Guardian‘s iPhone app, which has been downloaded over 570,000 times since relaunching in January 2011, currently has 96,543 paying global subscribers — that’s a 17 percent conversion rate. The Guardian hasn’t provided revenue figures for its iPhone app, but by our estimate, it brings in nearly £500,000 in annual sales (before Apple’s commission).

If the same proportion of current iPad readers (25,000) subscribed to the tablet edition today, it would yield an estimated £3 million in annual iPad sales (before Apple’s commission). And that is just on week-one numbers, which are likely to grow through the winter.

iOS 5 is scoring uplift for both publishers’ free-trial apps and subscriptions to those apps, according to early disclosures from Future and Exact Editions.

The Guardian‘s actual conversion prospects will depend in part on how much value readers ascribe to the iPad edition versus the publisher’s other outlets, like its free website and mobile site, free Android app and the stories now being promoted to millions of Facebook users.

Right now, the iPad app includes only a portion of the content published on the free Guardian.co.uk website and none of its bells and whistles like liveblogs. For these, the app links out to the site.

BBC technologist Mo McRoberts blogs: “(It) seems an odd retrograde step, given the Guardian’s ‘digital first‘ kick. It also seems a very odd way of going about getting some much-needed cash out of those who currently use the website.”

Alan Rusbridger recently responded to a tweeter who made the same point: “It’s version 1., aimed mainly at people who want an alternative to the newspaper. Other versions to follow.”

Disclosure: Our publisher ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.

Though it will be free for three months after launch thanks to a sponsorship from broadcaster Channel 4, the paper will then start requiring £9.99 ($15.52) per month. Access will be free for those who subscribe in print, which costs from £27.38 ($42.53) per month. The app will continue carrying ads.

The fee is 24 times the subscription rate of The Guardian‘s iPhone app, which costs £4.99 ($7.75) per year everywhere bar the U.S. (where it goes free to build audience). And it less than a third of the cost of the equivalent print Guardian weekday and Saturday editions. Unlike iPhone, the iPad edition will also be charged for outside the UK including the U.S., at equivalent currency rates.

The iPad subscription rate puts The Guardian at the same price as a monthly mobile music subscription, and the same as equivalent iPad editions from The Times and The Telegraph.

Perhaps surprisingly, the idea appears to be mimicking a lean-back print experience, albeit with a Windows 8-style interface rather than a page-turning replica. That is despite editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger saying of rival newspapers’ iPad editions: “They were beautiful but they were kind of recreating the newspaper on the iPad”.

For example, although liveblogs, which the paper runs on the web and through iPhone, is one of Guardian.co.uk’s main strategic digital ideas, they are absent from the iPad app…

“We’re not going to be scrambling to update it every minute or every hour,” Rusbridger says in a promo video.

“We will do that on the browser, the browser is a place to go for liveblogging and to go searching for material. This is going to be a different kind of read, a bit more reflective.”

That means certain clicks within the iPad edition will actually send readers out to the Guardian.co.uk website.

The iPad edition appears visually rich, with prominent positioning for photographs. Guardian News & Media says of the product…

“The app is a tablet version of the Guardian’s Monday to Saturday paper. The app will include content from the Guardian Monday-Saturday papers including sport, G2, MediaGuardian, EducationGuardian, SocietyGuardian, Film & Music, Money, Work, Travel, Family and Review. It will also include related web articles, which open in an in-app browser.”

Rusbridger later clarified: “It’s version 1., aimed mainly at people who want an alternative to the newspaper. Other versions to follow.”

The Observer‘s Sunday content is left out. An Observer iPad edition was not announced.

The Guardian also recently launched its smartphone app on Android and Windows for free.

» Disclosure: Our publisher ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.

Readers can switch between the UK and US versions of the Guardian homepage by choosing from a dropdown menu at the top left-hand corner of each edition’s front page.

Janine Gibson, editor of GNM’s US operation, said of Wednesday’s launch: “It’s just one page today, but we hope that by presenting a targeted homepage, we’ll be able to better display the stories that are most relevant to our US readers.”

The move is the latest in GNM’s shift to a digital-first strategy, announced by editor-in-chief Alan Rusbriger in the summer.

Gibson added: “The site will be a gradual build which will allow us to monitor audiences and grow according to behaviour and what our users want – we’re starting small but thinking big. It’s fantastic to know that we will have the freedom to innovate and experiment with new forms of digital journalism with the full support of the Guardian brand behind us.”

The newspaper group has also hired Robert Mackey, editor of the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) news blog The Lede, as a reporter and blogger.

Gibson said: “We’re delighted that Rob is joining guardiannews.com. He has tremendous journalistic talent and has pioneered the live-blogging experience for millions of readers over the years.”

GNM also publishes MediaGuardian.co.uk.

Disclosure: Our publisher ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.

This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.