• QVC last month acquired Oodle’s U.S. operation to beef up its social commerce ambitions (via release).
• Now UK search startup Adzuna says it has made its first acquisition by buying Oodle’s UK “traffic”. That means simply that the oodle.co.uk homepage and its job, property and car categories now redirect to adzuna.co.uk.
• But, in a third arrangement, other Oodle UK categories redirect to Mobiya, the mobile classified advertising outfit with which Oodle had a long-time partnership.

Oodle operated the influential Oodle Marketplace app, for placing classified ads on the social network. Facebook showcased Oodle back in 2009.

The marketplace was operated by Oodle’s U.S. division and so is now under the wing of QVC, which claims Marketplace has over 11 million monthly uniques.

In December, Oodle CEO Craig Donato wrote:

“Last year, we had the good fortune to become profitable and cash flow positive … But we also recognized that we needed to increase our growth rate. And to do that, we needed to expand our focus and capitalize on everything we’ve learned and built around social commerce.”

On Tuesday, the group said its Axel Springer Digital Classifieds group is buying 80 percent of Belgian property listings site Immoweb from its founding Rousseaux family and Produpress for €127.5 million ($164 million) – the latest in a spree nearing €1 billion this year.

In a nine-month trading update on Wednesday, the group says 2012 gains from digital media “will more than compensate for slightly lower revenues in the national print business and lower revenues in the international print business”.

The outfit publishes the Bild and Die Welt newspapers but has a roster of portal content sites and recently has been buying heavily in to online classified advertising services including French property ads site SeLoger for a whopping €633 million and TotalJobs for £110 million.

The publisher also operates autohaus24.de (auto classifieds), immonet.de (real estate) and buecher.de (e-tail) but its new push in to classified sites minus the content comes through its recently formed Digital Classifieds unit, a JV funded with General Atlantic.

On Wednesday, Springer reported digital media were “the growth engine of the group”, with category revenues growing 21.5 percent over the last year to 34.6 percent of its total. Digital advertising is now more than half of the group’s total (55.5 percent).

“Our digital activities, in part, are generating high double-digit margins,” CEO Mathias Döpfner (pictured) said, without clarifying which part.

So company revenue has grown by 3.9 percent despite a “weak” print advertising market and “ongoing slow economic conditions”.

The outfit is buying software, rights and people from Vienna-based Novosense, whose technology can support New York Times-style metered free-article allowances without logging readers’ consumption count via conventional cookies.

Twenty-five publishers of 66 sites in Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland have put a small percentage of their web content into respective national payment systems operated by Piano Media. Unlike paywalls for individual news sites, which are fast being rolled out around the world, Piano currently charges a single monthly fee for access to all publishers’ material.

But, through the Novosense acquisition, there is an addition coming in December. “Some of our media partners were asking for individual systems,” CEO Tomáš Bella says (via release). Bella will call the added model “Piano Solo.”

While hard pay-or-leave systems are a spiky reader proposition, meters are finding some favor. The New York Times’ 10-free-articles meter has brought the publisher more revenue and a circulation hike without impacting web traffic.

But such meters can notoriously be cracked, for instance, by deleting the cookie files that count articles read by individual visitors. Novosense boasts an “innovative algorithm” that relies on an alternative  method of user tracking, which it does not describe.

The jury is somewhat out on Piano Media’s existing shared-kiosk system until it can disclose how many monthly subscribers it has in each of its three existing countries. But the task of corralling rival publishers into a single system is considerable — and one that would become harder in larger, more competitive countries to which Piano wants to expand.

With Novosense’s addition, Bella says: “Now individual media can move ahead on their own…without having to wait for smaller or more conservative partners to make a similar decision.”

Novosense’s service also includes some data tools for building user profiles. Piano raised €2 million in April. Acquisition price is not disclosed.

Three publishers – DMGT, Trinity Mirror and Iliffe News & Media – are in talks to pool their local news assets in to a vehicle called Local World.

This weekend, The Times reported: “David Montgomery, the former Mirror Group chief executive, is understood to be in talks to acquire Northcliffe Media from DMGT for almost £100 million with a view to merging it with Iliffe News & Media.”

DMGT has confirmed talks. Monday morning, Trinity Mirror also announced it is “in discussions towards taking a minority interest in a new company comprising the assets” of Northcliffe and Iliffe.

Such a tie-up could combine the number one, four and 11 publishers in UK regional news, allowing them to save further costs by combining many functions.

Trinity Mirror’s involvement is interesting since new CEO Simon Fox only this month declared he will merge the company’s distinct national and regional units.

The local and regional news industry has been ravaged in recent years by an ad downturn more pronounced than even national level and by audiences’ digital migration. The industry has responded with waves of downsizing and, in some places, lacklustre digital product development.

Another regional publisher, Johnston Press, has lately been forming a coherent vision for local news in the digital era despite being heavily debt-laden – confidence in locality and an ambition to aggregate its local news operations in to national themed web brands.

If Local World adopted a similar template, it could prove an interesting proposition.

But this deal could face significant regulatory hurdles. Several small newspapers have changed hands over the last year as publishers have adjusted their portfolios – but even a small deal, like that in which local publisher KM Group tried to buy seven of Northcliffe’s titles – was blocked by the Competition Commission.

For instance, uniting Northcliffe (South West Wales Publications including South Wales Evening Post) with Trinity Mirror regionals (The Western Mail, South Wales Echo and Celtic Weeklies) would give Local World near exclusive lock-up on south Wales readers.

Newspaper watcher Roy Greenslade calls Montgomery “a consistent cold-blooded cost-cutter”, observing: “If Local World gets off the ground, I think this could well be a major turning point for the whole industry.”

“Penguin Random House” will be held 47 percent by Pearson and 53 percent by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann but does not include Bertelsmann’s business books. So why are the companies merging? An announcement says:

“The publishing and commercial success of Penguin and Random House can best be sustained and enhanced through a partnership with another major international publishing house.

“(We) believe that the combined organisation will have a stronger platform and greater resources to invest in rich content, new digital publishing models and high-growth emerging markets. The organisation will generate synergies from shared resources such as warehousing, distribution, printing and central functions.”

Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino:

“Together, the two publishers will be able to share a large part of their costs, to invest more for their author and reader constituencies and to be more adventurous in trying new models in this exciting, fast-moving world of digital books and digital readers.”

Penguin CEO John Makinson:

“All of us who work in book publishing experience every day the breathtaking pace of change in our industry. The partnership that we are announcing today will position Penguin Random House at the forefront of that change.”

In a letter to staff, Random House CEO Markus Dohle, who will occupy that role in the JV whilst Makinson becomes chair, claimed:

“We will accelerate our digital transformation, while ensuring a strong future for print. We will offer more services for physical retailers, while diversifying in the digital space.

“Authors and their agents will continue to enjoy an enormous choice of publishing homes, where creative autonomy and great resources will be a defining hallmark.”

Thanks to planned cost savings from back-office combination, the JV’s “organic investment in authors and new product models will exceed the total” they are currently making independently, the companies say.

The merger will create a global book publishing powerhouse with a presence in the fast-developing digital markets China, India and Brazil.

It will likely also give the two publishers greater clout when negotiating with digital distributors like Apple, Amazon and Google.

Penguin sales during the first nine months of this year dipped by one percent, although ebook revenue jumped 35 percent.

• Magazine publisher Burda, which owns 39 percent of LinkedIn rival Xing, is offering to buy the rest of the professional social network for €44 per share (€147 million, $190 million), reports FR.
• But Bild publisher and online advertising operator Axel Springer is selling its multiplayer online game portal Gamigo to focus on its content portals, marketing and classifieds portals (announcement).

Burda’s business bet

Hamburg-based, Nasdaq-listed Xing is a big player in the workplace social network stakes, but still trails LinkedIn, which is now expanding fast in to content-centric engagement and is unfolding redesigned profiles.

Burda’s lifestyle magazine activities include the web portal of its Chip computer title, whilst the group also holds stakes in the Tomorrow Focus ad company and its Burda Digital Ventures investment vehicle – an UberMedia backer. With titles across parenting, cars and fashion, Xing is an unusual fit in the company.

Games served their purpose

As well as online, mobile and tablet channels for its news and lifestyle publishing, Axel Springer has been piling heavily in to online-native classifieds, buying a host of such sites, including French property ads site SeLoger for a whopping €633 million and TotalJobs for £110 million. The publisher also operates autohaus24.de (auto classifieds), immonet.de (real estate) and buecher.de (e-tail).

Now it is selling Gamigo, which it bought in 2009, to Düsseldorf-based gaming investor Samarion to “focus on core competences in its digital business”, the group says.

Gamigo started life in 2000 as a gaming magazine but began publishing its own games themselves.

Since 2009, Springer has been busy beginning to charge for its news content on mobile and tablet devices. Ironically, the company has credited Gamigo – which has sold virtual gifts – with having showed it the way on content charging.

Big-four ad agency Publicis Groupe is taking the next step in sector consolidation by offering to acquire the Amsterdam-based digital group LBi for a hefty €416 million ($542 million) (announcement).

LBi is one of Europe’s largest remaining independent digital agencies and operates in 16 countries with 2,200 staff. Its website says: “To us, the unicorn symbolises the never-ending quest for digital mastery.”

These dedicated agencies are going to the big old boys as the big four ad groups acquire expertise in an ad industry that is increasingly digital.

• Publicis already acquired Digitas in 2006, bought Razorfish from Microsoft in 2009 and acquired Rosetta in 2011.
• Rival WPP – highly acquisitive in digital and emerging markets – bought one of the other big remaining digital outfits, AKQA, in June, with ambitions to turn it in to a Silicon Valley advertising development house.

LBi scored EBITDA of €19.9 million in 2011 on 12 percent higher revenue of €196.6 million. Its board has support for Publicis’ bid. LBi clients include Volvo, Johnson & Johnson and Coca Cola.

The company, which moves channels for broadcasters, is buying Connect TV, a start-up whose technology can make internet video streams and apps appear inside the EPG of the UK’s Freeview digital terrestrial broadcasting system as though they were regular TV channels.

Connect TV says it has doubled the number of channels available through Freeview. So far, its channel line-up mostly comprises foreign fare like China’s CCTV, France 24  and Turkey’s Haber Turk. The channels are delivered through Ethernet to Freeview HD boxes.

We tend to think that most living room IPTV solutions, beside dedicated internet boxes, comprise the systems developed by TV makers themselves like Samsung, Sony and LG.

But the TV upgrade cycle is drawn-out, and there remains a significant lifespan for Freeview, whether through boxes or integrated in TVs.

Arqiva is also an equity holder in YouView – a UK JV with broadcasters and telcos to make Freeview internet TV boxes. Its acquisition of Connect TV therefore begs the question – what can Connect TV do that YouView can’t? And, if YouView can’t do it, why not?

Add to that the emerging European standard for terrestrial IPTV, HbbTV, and the UK DTG’s own Dbook 7 standard, and it’s clear there are now umpteen ways in which internet content will be delivered to television sets. Arqiva buying Connect TV is an attempt to have Freeview re-assert its authority as a standard. But then again, that’s what YouView was supposed to do, too.

This is the latest foray in to IPTV for Arqiva, a company more used to radio spectrum than internet delivery.

It once rescued the technology of Project Kangaroo, the joint venture through which BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4 were to bring commercial VOD to computers but which was prohibited on competition grounds. But, having launched the service as “SeeSaw”, Arqiva handed off most of the service to U.S. investment group Criterion, which lost content relationships and ruffled staff’s feathers. SeeSaw recently shut down.

If Arqiva was unable to run a content service, Connect TV at least appears closer to its core competency of distribution technology.

It is buying German sports portal operator Sportal, as part of its ongoing effort to build out its global audience.

Perform already bought Spox.com and Mediasports in Germany last year. Sportal.de claims 800,000 unique monthly users, and operator Sportal GmbH already provides content and services for  Spiegel, Süddeutsche, RTL/sport.de, Motain and Sportal Media gruppe Switzerland

Perform did not disclose an acquisition price to the London stock Exchange. Sportal did €1.4 million in revenue in 2011, Perform said.

Perform  raised £72.5 ($116.26) million in its London IPO float in April 2011, since when it has:-

• Taken full ownership of the Watch&Trade online sports betting service.
• Taken control of soccerway.com publisher, Holland’s Global Sports Media.
• Bought Germany’s Spox and Mediasports for up to €16 million.
• Offered €120 million for sports data group RunningBall
• Snapped up Turkish sports websites mackolik.com and sahadan.com.

Perform’s most game-changing deal happened prior to the float, when it bought Goal.com.

Company execs have benefitted from being public now. Last week, Perform made more shares available, so that they could reap windfalls. Co-CEO Simon Denyer made £4.1 million, co-CEO Oliver Slipper made £1.2 million, CFO David Surtees made £1.7 million.

Denyer and Slipper sold around five percent of their total holding. Denyer also gave shares worth £1 million to the charities Richard Thomas Leukaemia Fund, Great Ormond Street Hospital and WorldVision.

The supermarket chain is acquiring Mobcast, a vendor of white-label e-book stores, for £4.5 million ($7.1 million) (RNS) to further fuel its own digital book ambitions.

Mobcast was co-founded in 2007 by “Andy McNab”, the pseudonym for a secretive former SAS soldier turned novelist. It powers e-book stores for Orange and T-Mobile (UK) and for SingTel’s Skoob brand, supplied e-books to Nokia’s Ovi store, as well as other clients.

Tesco sold 10.7 percent of the UK’s entertainment this spring, according to Kantar Worldpanel (via The Bookseller). UK supermarkets are facing off to replicate their increasingly strong position retailing physical content in digital media…

Tesco has now acquired Blinkbox to offer online movies and TV, We7 to offer streaming music and Mobcast for books. Sainsbury’s, building its Sainsbury’s Entertainment brand, has acquired social book discoverer aNobii for e-books, Global Media Vault for digital music distribution and contracted Rovi to build an upcoming movie store.

Tesco currently delivers an e-book store based on Adobe’s Digital Editions platform, requiring consumers have Adobe’s software on their desktop or mobile device.

Blinkbox CEO Michael Comish, who co-founded the service and led its sale to Tesco, is now CEO of a unit called Tesco Digital Entertainment. Comish (via release):

“We are already one of the UK’s largest booksellers and Mobcast will help us offer even more choice for the large and growing number of customers who want to buy and enjoy books on their digital devices…”

Tesco is closing its MP3 download store as it begins integrating We7′s streaming music, but, coyly, it will not confirm whether it will permanently ditch MP3 for streams. There is significant enough business left in music downloads that we may yet see Tesco acquire a digital music vendor to reboot, rather than trash, its downloads proposition.

A Mobcast spokesperson tells paidContent: “All current contracts will, of course, continue to be honoured.  Over time, the focus of the business will move to being predominantly focused on developing for Tesco.”