In the partnership with Wired, Target will offer “a custom-curated assortment of consumer electronics and gadgets” endorsed by Wired editors. The selections fall into four categories: Digital music, digital photos, productivity and body. Eleven of the products — including the Square credit card reader and Belkin WeMo switch — will appear in Wired-branded displays in Target’s 1,800 stores, and an expanded selection, including Fitbit products (see disclosure), is online at target.com/wired.

Wired gets a small percentage of sales revenue from the products, according to AdWeek, and the promotion will last for 12 weeks. ”We’re trying to push Wired out and beyond the four conventional walls of how it’s been defined its first twenty years,” Howard Mittman, VP and publisher of Wired, told AdWeek. “The ability to cross-pollinate opens [Target] up to affluent young men, and we get the opportunity to tap into their scale.”

Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent. (Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.)

Reuters first reported the news, citing a memo that Walmart sent to store managers on Wednesday. “We have recently made the business decision to not carry Amazon tablets and eReaders beyond our existing inventory and purchase commitments,” the memo read. “This includes all Amazon Kindle models current and recently announced.”

Walmart confirmed the change to Reuters and it appears to extend both to Walmart’s website and its stores.

The chain is still selling Barnes & Noble’s Nook as well as some other e-reader brands.

As with the change in Target’s policy, it’s unclear why Walmart stopped carrying Kindles. But the company is working hard to beef up its own e-commerce strategy. The company recently built its own shopping search engine, which it is now deploying on Walmart.com, and it takes cash for online purchases. Meanwhile, Amazon is trying to sell as much Amazon.com content to Kindle device users as possible. (The company is even selling physical products through Kindle Fire apps.) So it makes sense that Walmart would not want to turn over more sales to a competitor.

We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

The pilot program, which is initially available for Kindle and Nook and will be available on other platforms by the end of the year, launches on Sunday, July 15 with six books. Five are published by Random House: Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, 44 Charles Street by Danielle Steel, Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson. The sixth book, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, is published by HarperCollins.

The ebooks are sold like gift cards and will be found in Target’s electronics section, near the e-readers. (Target no longer sells Kindles, but it carries other e-readers, like the Nook.) Here’s how it works: A consumer buys a card for a specific title. Target takes a cut and Livrada gets the rest. The consumer (or gift card recipient) goes to Livrada’s website to activate the gift card and choose whether he wants the book for Kindle or Nook. Livrada buys the book directly from Barnes & Noble or Amazon and sends it to the consumer’s e-reader.

Ebook gift-giving is still in early stages, but it generally happens entirely online. When you buy a Kindle book as a gift for someone else, for instance, they find out when they get an email. Livrada wants to make it more physical. “Email-driven gifting is boring,” Livrada cofounder and CEO Leonard Chen, formerly a senior director of digital strategy and business development at Warner Music Group, told me.

A consumer can obviously buy one of Livrada’s ebook cards for himself, but Chen thinks most people will give the cards as presents: “You can give your friend a gift if you know they have an e-reader but you don’t know which [brand].”

“We’re looking for new ways of facilitating gifting of ebooks,” said Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital officer at HarperCollins, “and we look forward to seeing how this new service can extend our reach to a wider range of consumers.”

Random House and HarperCollins pay Livrada marketing fees on the front end. Livrada also collects affiliate fees from Amazon and Barnes & Noble for referring sales.

Livrada’s cofounder and chairman is John Tantum, the founder and former president of Virgin Mobile USA. The company is currently self-funded and Chen says it is not actively fundraising yet — though that could become necessary later this year, when the company hopes to expand to other retailers, sell more titles and add support for platforms like iPad. Livrada is in discussions with other big-six and smaller publishers about adding their books to the program.

Will ebook gifting take off?

Many consumers still don’t know that it’s possible to give ebooks as gifts. Publisher Open Road ran a holiday campaign to try to educate them about the process last year, but most people still just buy ebooks for themselves. Livrada’s cards could make the process more spontaneous and physical. The cards themselves, which emphasize the books’ covers, look good and consumers may be tempted to pick them up. It’s possible, though, that they will still be confused about what the cards are for.

Companies have experimented with selling “physical” ebooks before, but have not gotten very far. Enthrill, a Canadian company, tested such a program last year and is now selling its ebook cards in 102 stores in Alberta. Livrada’s focus on gifting, and the cards’ availability nationwide, could help the concept get off the ground.

If there’s one question on which much of Facebook’s $60-billion market valuation hangs, it is whether the kind of “social advertising” the giant network offers to brands actually works or not — in other words, whether having fans and social discussion around a product translates into actual measurable sales. Facebook has now released some actual data from comScore that it says proves the value of building up a fan base on its platform, since doing so appears to increase the likelihood that a user will buy something later. But will the research convince advertisers to devote more time and money to Facebook’s social campaigns? And if so, how much of that will benefit Facebook directly?

The comScore study, which is called “The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works,” (PDF download available here) is the second in a series the web-analytics firm has done with Facebook. The first report came out last July, and argued that brands using the social network need to do more than simply build up a large fan base — they need to use a combination of paid and “earned” media (that is, content that is shared voluntarily by users) to promote whatever marketing message they are focusing on. The latest report is an extension of that case, with some statistical database on what Starbucks and Target have seen from their Facebook campaigns.

Fans of a brand buy more, and so do their friends

According to comScore, Starbucks saw a “statistically significant” improvement in purchasing behavior in its stores in the weeks following exposure to promotional content on Facebook. Perhaps most important of all, the analytics firm said this behavior was seen not just among those who were already fans of the brand on the social network, but also among friends of those fans — evidence of what comScore called a “latent branding impact.” The same kind of impact was seen in a study of buying behavior at Target stores, comScore said.

In a nutshell, the report says that by the fourth week following the exposure of fans and friends of fans to certain advertising content — whether in a “sponsored story” or some other social ad format — the test group’s purchasing rate of 2.12 percent was a little over half a percentage point higher than the control groups’ rate. According to comScore, that means the social advertising on Facebook drove an increase in actual sales of almost 40 percent.

As Peter Kafka of All Things Digital notes, the comScore research is a bit of a double-edged sword for Facebook, since it shows that “earned media” — that is, the kind of social sharing that in many cases brands don’t even have to pay for — can generate a substantial bump in sales all by itself, without the need for traditional display ads. Theoretically, that’s the kind of ammunition brands like General Motors could use to justify dropping their ad spending on Facebook and relying on social sharing of their marketing content instead.

Facebook display ads work too, says comScore

One of the comScore study’s conclusions seems to be aimed directly at this idea — and also at critics who question whether Facebook’s paid ads are effective when the click-through rates on them are so low (even lower than the rates on generic web advertising). The report notes that an analysis of the data showed “statistically significant” increases in both online and in-store purchasing for a major retailer after exposure to display ads, despite the lack of clicks, and that this “highlights the importance of using view-through display ad effectiveness in a medium where click-through rates are known to be lower than average.”

Facebook’s Brad Smallwood, head of measurement and insight for the social network, was more blunt in a comment to the Wall Street Journal about the results of the comScore research, saying it proved that “It’s a myth that Facebook advertising doesn’t work.” The Journal also noted that the quiet period following its initial stock offering has ended, so Facebook is now able to respond to some of the criticisms that arose during the IPO roadshow, and the comScore study is clearly part of that effort.

One thing the study also reinforces is just how much advertisers are betting on Facebook: according to comScore’s analysis, more than 15 percent of all U.S. online display ads were “socially enabled,” meaning they contained a message asking viewers to “like” or follow the brand or the campaign on Facebook. That’s almost double the number of ads that contained those kinds of messages in November of last year, the report said. That kind of bet is what drove Salesforce to spend close to a billion dollars to buy Buddy Media, which specializes in managing Facebook pages and social campaigns.

A source tells the Verge that the change is due to a “conflict of interest. The memo says “Target has reviewed our product assortment and has made the decision to no longer carry Amazon hardware (i.e., Kindle). Certain accessories for Amazon product will stay in the assortment.”

The memo instructs employees, “If you receive questions from guests, share that Target continually evaluates its product assortment [to ensure] the best quality and prices for our guests.” Employees are also instructed on how to handle media inquiries.

Kindles have already been removed from Target’s website. “We will continue to offer our guests a full assortment of ereaders and supporting accessories including the Nook,” Target told the Verge.

Why the change?

Target may simply not want to carry a product from a major competitor. After all, this reasoning could go, why should Target serve as a store showroom for Amazon products? Somewhat similarly, Barnes & Noble has refused to carry Amazon Publishing titles in its stores. However, it seems as if the change of heart happened relatively quickly: Just last November, Target VP merchandising Nik Nayar said in an Amazon press release, “This was a great Black Friday for Target and for Kindle Fire, which was the bestselling tablet in our stores on Black Friday. We’re excited so many guests chose Target as their destination for the new family of Kindle devices.”

It’s also possible that Amazon demanded better terms on Kindle sales from Target and Target refused. I’ve asked Amazon for comment.

The Verge wonders if the change could be related to Target’s partnership with Apple on a mini-store test program.

Target began carrying Kindles in 2010 and used Amazon to power its website until 2011. When the company reassumed control, it said, “This re-launch of Target.com marks a first step towards Target’s ambitious plans for multi-channel expansion.”

Kindles are available in a variety of other bricks-and-mortar stores, including Best Buy, Walmart, Radio Shack, Staples, Office Depot and Sam’s Club.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user pagedooley

Aspen resident Jerald Bovino filed a lawsuit in federal court asking Apple and retailer Target to pay royalties for using his technology.

The claim is based on US patent 6,977,809 which describes an “integral case” that attaches to a computer. The patent says the invention is useful for situations like airport X-ray lines.

The iPad Smart Cover, which sells for $39.95, attaches to Apple tablets with a magnet and covers the screen.

The Bovino patent refers to a series of ribs on the case that protect the device:

The iPad smart cover also contains ribs (though this doesn’t mean it is infringing):

The patent was issued in 2005, six years before Apple unveiled the iPad 2 and its cover.

In a coincidence, the Patently Apple blog reported this week that the company  received a design patent for the iPad cover.

Bovino may have his hands full as Apple has many intellectual property veterans in its legal team. The company may claim Bovino’s patent is invalid because it is obvious or not new.

Here’s a copy of the complaint:

iPad Cover Lawsuit Copy

Sugar Inc is a case in point.

Since launching in 2006 as a network of women’s interest blogs, Sugar has grown into a media powerhouse through organic expansion and a steady diet of acquisitions. But even though Sugar has multiple revenue streams, a swelling readership and claims it is profitable, it receives little notice.

“From the media landscape, we don’t get much attention,” says Chief Revenue Officer, Kristine Shine. “It’s interesting because from a brand and advertising perspective, there’s tremendous interest in women-only content sites.”

The Sugar sites themselves are targeted at “trendsetting Y women” and arranged in verticals that focus on topics like food, fitness, beauty and kids. Its flagship brand is celebrity site Pop Sugar.

From a business perspective, the most remarkable feature about the sites is the degree to which brands and advertising are baked into the content. In practice, this means everything from product placements in videos to slide shows in which readers can click through to buy the items they see.

Sugar also works with brands like Target and the Gap to create “branded content” videos, often in partnership with third party bloggers, that run on the sites as sponsored stories. Here’s an example in which Sugar worked with blogger Jessie Adore to promote Levi’s Curve ID program.

Shine wouldn’t disclose specific numbers but did say that half of Sugar’s revenues came from a “display” and content bucket while the other came from a commerce bucket (which presumably includes commissions from third party product sales).

Sugar’s multiple revenue streams aren’t unusual, of course. Scratch the surface on most digital content brands and you’ll find a variety of side ventures that help buttress the editorial operation.

The question here is whether there is something particular about Sugar’s female audience that makes the sites so amenable to commerce and branded content — or whether any other media site could borrow from Sugar’s playbook.

David Reibstein, a marketing professor at Penn’s Wharton School of Business, says that research suggests that women who use social media have a greater inclination to share and to listen than do men. This could mean that audiences on women’s sites like Sugar, which have a heavy social component, are more willing to consider purchase recommendations than general interest audiences.

But Reibstein says that tools to let consumers buy what they see are still evolving. This could mean, in turn, that Sugar is simply ahead of the curve among content sites in optimizing commerce potential.

Finally, there is the question of whether mixing media and commerce can work only for fluffy fare — or whether buy-through options will one day become a part of serious news media as well.

Kindle’s lack of retail presence until recently should have been one of the biggest advantages for Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) when it launched Nook late last year. But hampered by production and logistics issues, B&N couldn’t make the most of it during the 2009 holiday season. Now, the chain has hands-on display areas in its stores, with elaborate setups in its largest stores. It’s also adding other devices. It also has more competition for bookstore buyers with Borders ramping up. B&N, which recently put itself up for sale, is banking heavily on digital.

Meanwhile. Borders has revamped its e-reader strategy, moving beyond the idea that having a Sony (NYSE: SNE) kiosk is enough. It launched an e-bookstore with Borders-backed Kobo, added players from Kobo and Aluratek and made plans for in-store e-reader areas with a half-dozen devices. Today, following price cuts by Amazon and B&N, it lowered prices on the devices already on sale and those in the pipeline effective Sept. 1. The Kobo dips below the new $139 Wi-Fi-only Kindle to $129, while the Aluratek Libre drops to $99.99. The Velocity Micro Android-based Cruz Reader R101 can be pre-ordered $199, while the Cruz Tablet T103 is $299. The touch-screen color devices may be a draw once Borders gets e-reader buyers in the store but between the prices and the lack of name power, they also could get lost.

Borders is also making some other changes as e-readers catch on and consumers change buying habits, swapping some book space for Build-a-Bear sections and expanding its much-tweaked loyalty program. The chain is keeping its free rewards program based on purchases and adding a paid Borders Rewards version for $20 that will guarantee certain discounts and free shipping.

B&N has done a good job weaving the in-store experience, the Nook and its Nook e-reading platform but has been less successful when it comes to connecting it all to its paid loyalty program. If Borders can find a way to do that, it could encourage some loyalty from e-buyers. Borders PR tells me the program will offer discounts for some e-books but “however due to the agency model..not all are included.” More details in the release.

Until now, Amazon has sold the various models of its e-reader only through its own site, eschewing the retail option while competitor Sony (NYSE: SNE) went the in-store route (it has been in Target since 2008) and as Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) launched the Nook through its own stores. That’s not enough in today’s competitive e-reader world where every other major option already shipping can be found in stores and the more-glamorous iPad can be fondled at Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) stores and many Best Buys.

This past Sunday, B&N’s Nook went on sale through BestBuy.com and was supposed to be in stores. (When I checked Sunday afternoon, my local Best Buy had yet to receive a shipment and there was no sign of a promised display area for the device.) Meanwhile, B&N plans to sell other e-readers in its own stores. As the owner of a major e-bookstore, the company gains any time buyers pick up a device linked to its virtual bookshelves.