Yahoo has confirmed that it hired Google ad exec Michael Barrett as its new chief of revenue.

As I reported earlier, Barrett will be in charge of advertising revenue and operations worldwide at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, including units in the U.S., Europe and Asia reporting in to him. Barrett will report directly to interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.

The move to hire the high-profile exec — who has been working at Google since it bought an ad tech company he ran a year ago — gives Yahoo a boost in its most critical area of business.

The search giant acquired supply-side advertising technology start-up AdMeld for $400 million a year ago. Before that, Barrett had previously worked at a range of digital and traditional media companies.

His hiring is also a clear signal that Yahoo is about to make major changes to its ad business going forward. According to numerous sources, Yahoo is again mulling a plan to abandon or sell large parts of its ad tech business and rely on third-party vendors, including Google.

Sources said Barrett was interested in the big opportunity Yahoo possessed and felt the ad market was still interested in helping it maintain its online ad business.

Here’s the official Yahoo press release on the Barrett appointment:

Yahoo! Appoints Michael Barrett as Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer

SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 18, 2012 – Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) announced today that it has appointed Michael Barrett as Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer. Barrett will be responsible for Yahoo’s advertising revenue and operations globally for the company, with Americas, EMEA and APAC regional leads reporting to him.

“Michael Barrett is regarded as one of the most successful and influential executives in media and technology, and I am thrilled to have him join Yahoo! in this critical role,” said Ross Levinsohn, Interim Chief Executive Officer. “I am confident that his deep industry experience and relationships will help us drive our strategic vision, taking Yahoo!’s industry-leading position to the next level.”

Barrett joins Yahoo! from Google where he led the integration efforts following Google’s acquisition of Admeld, Inc. in December 2011. Barrett joined Admeld as CEO in 2008, and under his leadership the company became the leading global supply side platform solution for premium publishers. Prior to Admeld, Barrett worked at Fox Interactive Media as Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer, where he oversaw worldwide revenue for all properties including MySpace and FoxSports.com and worked closely with Levinsohn. Before that, Barrett served as Executive Vice President of Sales and Partnerships at AOL Media Networks and held senior sales positions at interactive leaders Yahoo!, GeoCities and Disney Online.

“Yahoo! is one of the largest and most iconic Internet companies in the world,” said Barrett. “I am grateful for this opportunity to work with Ross and a group of immensely talented and energized people, all focused on driving Yahoo’s leadership and strategic position on a global basis. I am looking forward to contributing everything I can to that effort.”

In his new role at Yahoo!, which he will assume in early July, Barrett will be part of the senior executive team, reporting directly to Levinsohn.

According to sources close to the situation, Yahoo has hired high-profile advertising exec Michael Barrett to be its chief of revenue.

Sources said Barrett will be in charge of ad revenue and operations worldwide, including units in the U.S., Europe and Asia reporting in to him. Barrett will report directly to interim CEO Ross Levinsohn when he starts in July.

(Update: Yahoo confirmed the hiring in a press release.)

The move to hire the experienced Barrett — who has been working at Google since it bought an ad tech company he ran a year ago — is a significant one, giving the company a boost in its most critical area of business.

It is also a clear signal that the Silicon Valley Internet giant is about to make major changes to its ad business going forward. According to numerous sources, Yahoo is again mulling a plan to abandon or sell its large parts of its ad tech business and rely on third-party vendors.

In fact, it has been in talks with Google about taking over its automated ad sales and ad network operations, while focusing instead on premium ad sales and sponsorships. Yahoo is also considering turning its entire search business over to Microsoft, with which it already has an ad partnership.

“Yahoo is going to be a media company again — in the digital ad sales business and not in the ad tech business,” said one person.

That impending change has already caused much debate within Yahoo already, with sides drawn between those who think Yahoo should not outsource its core ad technology and those who believe that the company lost the battle to others already — most especially Google — due to poor execution over the years.

While there have been a variety of multibillion-dollar plans drawn up by some to double down on Yahoo’s ad tech business, that effort has now been supplanted by a feeling that the company needs to quickly get out of businesses it cannot win in or see growth.

Barrett is one of the few obvious choices to usher in a new era, given his long experience in all aspects of both digital and traditional media.

He used to work with Levinsohn at Fox Interactive Media, but came to Google a year ago, when the search giant bought AdMeld for $400 million. Barrett was CEO of the supply-side advertising technology platform, which worked on behalf of publishers by trying to get the best prices for their inventory from a variety of ad networks.

Barrett has also worked in ad jobs at a range of companies, including AOL and Disney Online, as well as at Meredith Publishing and Newsweek. He even previously worked at Yahoo, when it bought GeoCities, back in the Web 1.0 era.

As part of the changes, sources said, current Americas sales head Rich Riley will be stepping down from the job he just got under ousted CEO Scott Thompson. He will remain at the company, but it is not clear in what position.

In an effort to minimize the impact of massive layoffs that Yahoo’s top management has been planning, according to sources close to the situation, one of the latest ideas to save costs and presumably jobs by new CEO Scott Thompson is to sell off much of its advertising technology platform, including Right Media.

And among the possible buyers Thompson has been targeting in recent visits: Google and Microsoft, as well as Silver Lake, the private equity firm that had once been talking to the Silicon Valley Internet giant about making a large investment in the company.

(That particular deal has gone south, but there is always yet another scheme on the horizon at Yahoo!)

The concept behind such a sale, according to several sources inside and outside the company, is to turn a cost center into a revenue source, with Yahoo essentially outsourcing a business that was a cornerstone of its strategy. A negotiable number of employees affiliated with those units would then move over to the new owner.

The most ideal plan, said sources, would be to sell Yahoo’s whole advertising technology “stack,” including the Right Media Exchange, a marketplace for advertisers, publishers and ad networks to trade online ads. Yahoo bought it for $700 million in 2007.

According to info on the company’s site, it has “300,000 active global buyers and sellers and more than 11 billion daily transactions.”

Also part of the possible package is APT, a system Yahoo has built to make buying and selling online advertising easier. In addition, Yahoo’s technologies for display-ad serving have been mentioned as a possibility for sale.

It’s unclear what the potential sale means for the new ad strategy that U.S. boss Ross Levinsohn and his lieutenant Jim Heckman have been pursuing since last summer. That plan included its own acquisition of ad network Interclick and an attempt to sync up with rivals AOL and Microsoft in an effort to fend off Google and some third-party players, like ad networks.

But the reason for contemplating much a major move — which has been considered before, but never has been seriously offered — are obvious: While Yahoo once dominated this arena, it has steadily lost ground, especially to Google. The search giant has made almost all of its money in search-related ads, but has been moving aggressively via its DoubleClick and other ad-serving entities into higher-level ads.

Microsoft has also been trying to compete, as has AOL, but it’s getting to be an expensive race, and one where Yahoo would have to make major investments to once again gain momentum. Building up this business again had been the aim of co-founder Jerry Yang, who wanted to go big in the arena in a number of ways before he left the company earlier this year.

But those days seem to be over at Yahoo.

“A lot of what has happened so far under Scott [Thompson] has been trying to find more revenue anywhere it can be generated, and get out of businesses that are not growing,” said one person. “Right now, it’s a lot about what we shouldn’t do rather than what we should.”

That has meant visits to see both Google and Microsoft about possible deals by Thompson, with the involvement of CFO Tim Morse and Chief Product Officer Blake Irving.

Thompson (pictured here) has also recently been talking to Silver Lake about the ad-platform sale, in a deal that might include the Andreessen Horowitz venture fund. This would be a different kind of transaction, said sources, in which a separate company would be formed, with Yahoo owning a piece and contracting with the new entity to provide ad technology.

All this activity is related to the layoffs in the works of perhaps thousands of employees, which were to have been communicated to the company this week.

Sources said those have been delayed for some weeks for several reasons, including whether to consider more deeply if certain larger business units can be spun off, sold or somehow transformed. (To be clear: Major layoffs are still being planned, but now might take place in two parts, said sources, in what is a quickly changing and volatile atmosphere at Yahoo.)

Another area being looked at, said sources, is Yahoo’s search advertising partnership with Microsoft, which has not been as successful as had been expected. While Yahoo has been working with the software giant about improving the results, Thompson has apparently been contemplating other possibilities, including working with Google (calling all regulators!) and/or laying off up to 900 employees who work on the company’s search offering.

Any of these moves could, of course, cause a firestorm of controversy, which Thompson appears to not worry much about. He was the driving force in Yahoo’s patent lawsuit against Facebook earlier this week, which is largely attracting a negative reaction across the tech landscape.

A number of prominent voices have spoken out against the legal action, including well-known VC Fred Wilson, who yesterday penned a poisonous blog post, titled “Yahoo Crosses the Line.”

It ends thusly: “I am not writing this in defense of Facebook. They can and will defend themselves. I am writing this in outrage at Yahoo! I used to care about that company for some reason. No more. They are dead to me. Dead and gone. I hate them now.”

Ouch!

Also weighing in publicly via Twitter was former Yahoo director Eric Hippeau, who was one of the company’s first investors, which is embedded below:

Pathetic and heartbreaking last stand for Yahoo bit.ly/yirCcj It’s all over. I loved you very much.

— Eric Hippeau (@erichippeau) March 13, 2012

Double ouch!

All I can say is that Thompson certainly has a lot of gumption. That has actually been his M.O. from the start, said several sources, with the former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit and dark horse cold-emailing his way into the Yahoo CEO job.

True story: He had not been among its list of possible candidates — largely because he had been placed in his job at eBay many moons ago by Heidrick & Struggles, which was conducting the Yahoo CEO search, and that’s a talent acquisition no-no to poach someone you placed.

That did not stop Thompson, who thought he might be good for the job and reached out directly to board members at the end of the selection effort, which then led to the search committee and soon enough to the job in what was a very quick vetting and secretive (although not secretive enough!) hiring process.

Since then, Thompson has been on a tear, from working on a restructuring to trying to assuage activist shareholder Dan Loeb to helping put the kibosh on its Asian stake sale talks to suing Facebook. And now this sale effort, too.

If the peripatetic Thompson — who might need a dose of Ritalin before this thing is over — wanted to get noticed by the tech powers that be: Mission accomplished!

“He’s definitely someone who appears to have decided on shooting the moon with a lot of these actions,” said one person close to the situation, referring to the move in the card game of Hearts, which is a risky gambit to capture every penalty card worth 26 points in order to win. “I just hope no one loses an eye in the process.”

(That would be triple ouch, by the way.)

No comments all around, but everyone was certainly cordial on this rainy morning.

Starting next week, Playdom said it will begin publishing Triple Town, which has already been on Facebook for some time.

Spry Fox said it will retain all creative authority over the game, and added that, going forward, it won’t have to worry about acquiring new users or figuring out how to run advertising campaigns.

In a statement, Spry Fox said: “Our games have reached millions of users, but never concurrently. We have constantly worried about our ability to scale without major service interruptions or other related problems … We are grateful for the opportunity to learn from [Playdom] and lean on them.”

The idea of publishing third-party content is not new in the world of gaming, but it is for Disney’s Playdom. It said while it sees an opportunity to leverage the creativity of independent developers, it will not be at the sacrifice of developing games internally.

Over the past year, Playdom has struggled to keep up its development after being acquired by Disney, but now it claims to be back on track and has more than a dozen titles under development, including a game based on Marvel superheroes.

“Playdom’s in-house development studios are still hard at work … but we also recognize that there are a lot of independent social game developers creating amazing new experiences, too,” the company said in a statement.

Spry Fox’s Triple Town, a puzzle game that challenges players to build cities by matching three or more of the same game pieces, has received some acclaim of its own. The trade magazine Gamezebo recently named it the best game of 2011.

So says a survey commissioned by a publishers’ trade group: It finds that two-thirds of people who read magazines on tablets and e-readers think they’ll be spending more time with digital issues over the next year. Many of them — 46 percent — are consuming more magazines — both in print and digital form — than they did before they got their hands on an iPad.* And 63 percent of them want more digital stuff to read.

Overall, the survey has generally sunny news for the magazine business, though it’s fair to wonder if the Association of Magazine Media would release a survey that had glum news.

The report does offer some guidance for the industry: 89 percent of readers want publishers to adopt a uniform way of navigating magazines, and 69 percent like watching in-app videos that run less than minute.

The other point worth noting about the report is that it exists, period. The survey, conducted earlier this month, was completed by 1,009 people “pre-screened for their ownership of mobile devices and their use of magazine-branded apps.” Up until now, pollsters couldn’t have been able to find enough respondents to make that kind of poll possible, says Chris Kevorkian, the trade group’s executive vice president for digital: “We’ve been wanting to do this research for some time, but didn’t have the critical mass to query.”

*The survey isn’t explicitly about iPad magazine editions — in theory, it covers all tablet magazine apps, as well as magazines consumed on e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook. But the majority of these things are being read on Apple’s device.

Michael Bloom joined the publisher, which owns Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, and Men’s Journal, in May. On Friday afternoon, he sent out a memo announcing his departure. Here’s the bulk of the note:

As some of you already know, I’m moving on from Wenner Media. While it’s been a relatively short time, I’ve really enjoyed working with so many talented and creative people across Wenner’s incredible brands.

Over the past six months, a new digital leadership team has been put in place, and a lot of great work has been done to set the foundation of what will be a terrific digital future. I’m proud of what you guys have accomplished and I know that you will go on to do great things in 2012. I’ll certainly be rooting for you from the sidelines.

Unlike many of his competitors, Wenner Media owner Jann Wenner has never rushed to embrace digital publishing. For a long time, he did very little with the Web beyond handing over his flagship RollingStone.com site to RealNetworks.

That deal made him money, but it also allowed upstarts like Pitchfork to grab lots of territory and mindshare over the years. Last year, Wenner got control of the site again and moved to put most of it behind a pay wall.

Around the same time, Wenner declared himself unimpressed with the commercial upside of the iPad for magazine publishers, a position that put him at odds with the conventional wisdom. Since then, many of his peers have become much more sympathetic to his take.

Bloom, who had previously put in time at Sharecare, MTV, and AOL Time Warner, didn’t mention a new job in his note; Wenner Media hasn’t announced a replacement. I’ve asked Bloom and a Wenner rep for comment.

Disney, which has been busy reorganizing its interactive group, is buying Babble Media, a New York-based parenting platform that features several hundred mom bloggers.

The entertainment giant declined to provide the purchase price for the New York-based start-up, which was founded by aiming at urban hipster parents and has garnered more than $6 million in funding since it was spun off from Nerve Media several years ago.

Babble’s venture investors include Greycroft Partners, Village Ventures and iNovia Capital.

Co-founders Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman and the rest of the 40-person Babble staff will join the Disney Interactive Media Group unit as part of its Moms and Family portfolio, Disney said in its official press release (see below).

Disney described Babble as the “premier blogging platform for a new generation of connected parents.” To me, that roughly translates into Brooklyn-living, Bugaboo-pushing, organic arugula-eating, yoga-calm moms and sensitive New Age dads.

But don’t take my word for it — today’s front page features on Babble include “15 Vegan Recipes for Thanksgiving” and “Is It Selfish to Have One Child?” (Yum and kinda!)

The next obvious stop for its audience, after the kids get a little bigger: Gwyneth Paltrow’s fabulously twee and irksomely addictive GOOP.

But Brooke Chaffin, who is SVP of Moms and Family in the Disney Interactive Media Group, said in an interview that the highly interactive content site with a definite “sophisticated” editorial voice has become mainstream, and is actually where the whole category is going.

“Babble is sharing the experience and stories on a daily basis through the parents lens,” she said. “And it brings in a blog network that is so important to this audience, because it’s by, for and about parents, and that’s far more important for them than experts.”

There will be that, too, said Chaffin, who noted the site has grown 100 percent year over year. It is now up to four million unique monthly visitors.

Disney plans to add its more evergreen family-focused content to Babble, to give it more heft to compete with other similar parenting sites, such as Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, NBC’s iVillage, Parents.com and CafeMom.

Interestingly, Disney had taken a gander at buying CafeMom a while back.

Chaffin, who came to Disney earlier this year after a stint at Auditude and a long time at Yahoo, said Babble has carved out a unique niche in combining content with social — the current gold ring for a lot of publishers.

“What Babble is doing is best of breed … it is just a different approach to blogging,” she said. “It felt like we at Disney are about storytelling and Babble does an amazing job doing just that.”

Added Jimmy Pitaro, co-President of Disney Interactive Media Group: “Disney has a long legacy of storytelling, and no mom-blog platform empowers storytelling better or more powerfully than Babble. Babble is a strategic complement to our Moms and Family portfolio of sites, which together make up a business that is critical to Disney Interactive’s mission of delivering world-class products and content and growing engagement among our guests.”

In other words: Mainstream and hipster!

Here’s the Disney official press release:

THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY ACQUIRES LEADING ONLINE PARENTING PLATFORM BABBLE MEDIA, INC.

Burbank, California — November 14, 2011 — The Walt Disney Company, through its wholly owned subsidiary Disney Online, has acquired Babble Media, Inc., a leading online parenting platform featuring more than 200 influential mom bloggers. The acquisition of Babble further strengthens the position of Disney Interactive Media Group’s Moms and Family portfolio as a leading online resource for moms and families.

Disney Interactive’s Moms and Family portfolio is a trusted resource for parents today, giving them the online tools and information they need and the ability to share their experiences. Through the acquisition of Babble, Disney Interactive’s Moms and Family business gains a blogging platform that elevates the first-person stories of parenthood.

Since its inception in 2006, Babble has become one of the most celebrated parenting sites on the web, named by Time Magazine as one of the 50 Best Websites of 2010 and by Forbes as one of the Top 100 Websites for Women. Its stable of bloggers contribute daily to parenting topics including pregnancy, child care, health, food, family activities as well as lifestyle topics such as home, fashion and family products. As the premier blogging platform for a new generation of connected parents, Babble has created a vibrant community of parents who support, encourage and celebrate the highs and lows of raising children.

Babble attracts a broad and engaged audience with its nearly constant stream of posts, written for and by moms. Disney Interactive will infuse its Moms and Family evergreen content into Babble, thereby enriching the Babble user experience and extending the best of what Disney has to offer to today’s parents.

“Parents’ relationships with Disney are founded in stories, and Disney’s best stories are about families. We believe that Babble and Disney can harness the power of storytelling to inform, entertain and empower parents everywhere,” said Brooke Chaffin, SVP of Moms and Family, Disney Interactive Media Group. “With more than 3.9 million mom blogs in the US alone, Disney Interactive recognizes and values the important and powerful role moms have taken on in new media.”

“We can’t imagine a better next step than joining the world’s leading media company for families, The Walt Disney Company, and look forward to bringing together Babble’s resonant voice and community with Disney’s expansive family audience, wide range of content and multi-media platform,” said Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman, Co-Founders of Babble.

Babble will remain headquartered in New York. Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman will join the Disney Interactive Media Group.

Google has bought Apture, the start-up that makes a browser plug-in that adds additional contextual information to Web pages for the Internet’s most prominent publishers.

The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

A Google spokesperson said the search giant was interested not only in Apture’s product, but the team and the partnerships it had built.

Apture CEO Tristan Harris has spent some of the last four years wearing out the carpets in the offices of major online publishers.

In an interview today, Harris said that the Apture staffers will join the Chrome team at Google.

“We started the company to help people have more frictionless access to information,” he said. “And those features will take on new forms in the Chrome browser.”

Apture has raised $4.1 million in venture funding so far, including a $3.5 million round from Clearstone Ventures.

I am here at Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale, Calif., to check out “Product Runway,” which is the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s attempt to show that it can still innovate.

First and foremost is the launch of Livestand, a personalized news reader that is similar to Flipboard and a variety of other rivals, including — soon — Google.

It’s Yahoo’s attempt to present a business-as-usual feel — amidst a long and agonizing and very public strategic overview that might also include the sale of the company (or not!), in the wake of the recent firing of its last CEO, Carol Bartz.

It has caused a lot of trauma inside Yahoo, which can’t help with innovation.

But we press on!

In other words, despite the three-ring circus going on outside, Yahoo wants you to know it is still hard at work.

We begin:

10:35 am: As the strains of U2 die out, Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving takes the stage, which is actually set up in the company’s cafeteria. I can smell lunch being made nearby and I am hungry.

Apt — Yahoo certainly needs to show off a lot of cool stuff or its fate will be cooked.

No pressure, Blake!

“Personally, I am more bullish on Yahoo today,” he said. “What is Yahoo? Simple. It’s the premier digital media company. Period. Stop.”

Oh, if it were only that easy.

10:46 am: Irving pulls out his favorite slide, which looks like a chemistry test. It lists the various elements of the product strategy, with things like personalization, mobile, premium.

Now to Livestand, which is available on the Apple iTunes app store right now.

Don’t all rush at once!

Irving notes that Livestand is more than just an app — it is a platform.

In other words, Yahoo wants to help publishers publish online. Kind of a Facebook of content.

If Yahoo can pull it off, that is. (And, of course, unless Facebook decides to do the same.)

10:50 am: Livestand is an HTML5 “personalized living magazine.”

“This is the way Web pages are going to look,” declares Irving. Which is to say, heavy on photos, swoopy navigation, a television screen-like interface.

Irving uses the example of Surfer magazine, which is a good idea since waves always look pretty. Especially in a video-in-frame with Kelly Slater in Hawaii.

But, in essence, for anyone who has used Flipboard for years now, none of this is entirely different.

10:54 am: The look of what would be the Yahoo News page is actually much more interesting, since it is clearly a whole lot better than the Web page.

Irving also shows off a “living ad” — in this case, an unusually snuggly couple on a couch. It is cool, but creepy.

When launched, the ad has tap points. Irving — naughtily declaring about what is an ad, “I’ll tap that” — taps the lady’s butt, which would also have been my move. We learn about the jeans, of course.

10:58 am: Irving then shows off the ability to add feeds.

Next, something called “Cocktails.” First up, a developer tool called Yahoo Mojito and Yahoo Manhattan, which is a hosting service. The company will open-source both the technologies in 2012.

Irving brings up Mike Kerns, VP of Personalization & Social, who came to Yahoo when it bought the innovative sports fan site called Citizen Sports.

“We like to ship sh#t,” he notes. I like Mike Kerns immediately.

Kerns intros C.O.R.E. No, it is not a secret government organization that takes out fussy bloggers, who might be more critical than Yahoo execs would like.

In fact, it stands for “content optimization relevance engine.” Of course it does.

Simply put, C.O.R.E. is trying to link the right content or whatever to the right consumers and who likes what. Ladies like this, dudes like this. Apparently, “men of multiple ages” enjoy stories about golden chicken.

11:11 am: Kerns is moving on to social, especially its integration with Facebook. While much touted, sources tell me it has gone slower than expected in terms of use, but that it is improving.

Kerns talks about the idea of matching content to conversations to interests and, well, you know — the now exhausting world of modern media consumption.

The world in which you can no longer simply read an article and enjoy it — you must comment, share, discuss, parse, tweet.

Does anyone remember when you read something cool and just kept it to yourself?

Forget it, pal! It is a full-information society now and you better get on board and start poking your friends about every little thing.

(Personally, I plan on becoming a hermit in 3 … 2 … 1.)

11:18 am: Now Tim Parsey, who is Yahoo’s design head. He is hands down the most delightful exec the company has had in a while, mostly because he loves to smirk adorkably.

He shows off Yahoo’s first original design, which was a dull list. And then another really bad logo. But Parsey loves it! It’s kitschy!

Smirk attack!

Parsey moves into what has to happen now, which is to deliver a much more emotional experience and a much better designed one. He uses words like “humanism.”

Say what? He is right — Yahoo has for too long completely ignored design as an important part of the experience.

That’s why Flipboard was so quickly touted — it was pretty and fun. And it is why everyone is simply forced to love Apple products.

11:22 am: Parsey even has a code for it, called REM — for rational, emotional and meaningful.

He shows off a weather app. People take photos and they can be used in the app. Then Yahoo Mail for the iPad, whic is also handsome with photos and video. Livestand, also pretty.

“Great way to differentiate,” says Parsey. He calls it “one Yahoo!” Indeed.

11:35 am: I’ll admit it. After Parsey-fest, I zoned out for a sec when IntoNow dude, Adam Cahan, comes up.

Donut emergency!

Back to IntoNow, it’s the television indexing service that Yahoo bought in April.

Essentially, more ways to watch the media — in this case, video — and do 53 other things at the very same time. Memo to humanity: We will all be paying continuous partial attention for the rest of eternity.

Like I said: Hermitage!

11:41 am: Product dude Irving is back, making a point that, despite all the public mishegas, Yahoo has been busy at innovating.

A redo of email, better search, social “Facebar” with Facebook, Flickr for Google Android.

Irving is correct — Yahoo’s engineers have been hard at work and deserve kudos for doing so, even with attrition issues, stock declines and questions about the company’s very future being debated daily.

The problem is that too many of these improvements are mostly incremental and essentially table stakes for tech companies, most of whom have introed many more significant innovations in the same time frame as Yahoo has.

Google did Android, Google+ (as well as some notable failures). Microsoft did Kinect, Windows Phone, Windows 8. Amazon did Kindle Fire. Facebook did a range of major updates, as it has grown like a weed.

And there’s Apple. You might have heard of the iPhone and the iPad.

You get my point. Yahoo’s Product Runway today is well done, but what it really needs to be is just the beginning of a take-off.

11:48 am: Now Q&A time.

The first question is what took so long to get Livestand out, the second is why should people use Livestand since Flipboard and others have already been around for a dog’s age.

I ask about design — mostly because I want Parsey to use the word “delicious” a lot — and also about all the turmoil around the company and its impact on product creation. (I decide not to mention that Yahoo blew its acquisition of the bookmarking site, Delicious, and then sold it.)

Parsey delivers on the delicious scale, noting that Yahoo must have one design experience and yet has a lot of different interfaces. In other words, it cannot be Apple, but it can feel a lot more cohesive.

Irving talks a little bit around the obvious elephant in the room — the future of Yahoo — noting that the product staff was trying to focus and forget the storm going on outside.

“We have dreams about what this company can be,” says Irving.

You and me both, brother.

12:04 pm: More questions that are too detailed for my tastes, since they have delivered lunch and I can see it and I am ravenous.

As Parsey might say: It looks deliiiiiccccious.

Now, let’s hope Yahoo can do even more tasty stuff.

Bingo! Your service gets a lot more users.

We’ve seen and heard this story several times since Facebook’s most recent redesign, launched in September, which autoshares what users are reading, watching and hearing.

So services that are hooked into Facebook’s new “ticker” are seeing an influx of traffic — the same way you’d get traffic if you put up lots and lots of signs on a highway used by a half billion people per day.

Still, it continues to bear repeating, and it turns out that music subscription service MOG wants to share.

Here’s the growth for monthly active users plugged into MOG via Facebook, plotted by Inside Network’s AppData Facebook tracking service. The Facebook redesign kicked in just about a month ago, and sure enough, so did MOG’s traffic. It’s now at 160,000 monthly users, up 4x:

So that’s good, right? “This is the best distribution platform we’ve ever had,” says MOG CEO David Hyman.

He projects that if these growth rates continue, his service will have racked up 2.1 million monthly users by the end of the year. For context, Spotify, Facebook’s first among equals when it comes to music service partners, is on an even faster tear, with much bigger numbers. It already has 7.1 million monthly active users via Facebook, up from 1.1 million pre-Facebook redesign.

This is precisely what MOG was hoping would happen when it overhauled itself to offer free music to new users without requiring a credit card or any other commitment. (Competitor Rdio made a similar move, as did Spotify).

What we don’t know is how many of them will stick around. It’s entirely possible that MOG’s graph could trend down again, like it did in mid-October.

And what we really don’t know is how many of these new prospects will eventually start paying a monthly fee for access to features like mobile music. All of that free music costs MOG and its peers quite a bit, and they need to convert a minority of their users to make the model work.

There’s also a flip side to the redesign story, where some big Web sites/services that had counted on Facebook for traffic saw it drop dramatically after the overhaul. This week I chatted with a publisher who saw Facebook referrals drop by more than a third after the redesign, due to changes in the way the service surfaces shared stories from users’ friends.

That drop is similar to the effect some publishers noted after Google’s “Panda” overhaul. But the publisher I talked to this week says their sites at least were able to claw back much of that referral traffic by manually tweaking their sharing mechanisms.

Memo to Flipboard, as well as Pulse, CNN’s Zite and AOL’s Editions: You might want to make some room in the already-crowded news and social reader space, because you’re about to get some bigfoot company.

Next Wednesday, according to sources close to the situation, Yahoo will finally officially unveil its offering, called Livestand.

And perhaps as early as next week or in the weeks soon after, Google will also weigh in with its version of the genre — code-named Propeller — which also might be the product’s name. Another moniker under strong consideration: Currents.

As I have previously reported, Google Propeller is an HTML5 reader for the Apple iPad and Android — essentially a souped-up version of similar apps such as Flipboard, AOL’s Editions, Zite (which was just bought by Time Warner’s CNN) and Pulse.

All these apps are part of the drastically changing habits of media consumers, helping users better navigate numerous social and media feeds — such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as news sites and more — using handsome interfaces and touch technologies on tablet devices.

Flipboard, the most prominent and elegant of these offerings, is now available only on the Apple iPad.

Flipboard’s traction among elite users, along with its high-level design ethos and strong reviews, is why Google tried to buy the well-funded company last year, sources said.

But Flipboard — which is backed by some of tech’s biggest venture players, who have invested more than $60 million at a $200 million valuation — declined the kind offer.

At the time, sources said, Google told Flipboard execs that if it did not buy the start-up, it planned to do a version of its own.

Hence, after I heard about the product earlier this year, I dubbed it the Flipinator.

According to sources, Propeller will launch with a plethora of media partners, as well as integration into the Google+ social network. The aim of the search giant is to offer media companies easy tools for publishing content on these devices, as well as a better path to monetization.

That is essentially the same plan at Yahoo, which has been working on Livestand with hopes of it being a product that will woo publishers into tight collaboration with the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Livestand was announced by Yahoo’s now-fired CEO Carol Bartz in February, at a speech at the World Mobile Congress in Spain.

At the time, Bartz demoed a magazinelike platform that would allow publishers to put up content easily and give users the ability to personalize their selections based on search history and interests.

Bartz called it “content in context.” (You can see the demo video below.)

But while Bartz promised the product within three months, development has been slowed by its complex technologies, bugs and the need to sign on publishers.

Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving is pushing the product hard as a way for the company to reinvigorate its media products.

It’s not clear how many publishers Yahoo will have at launch, and neither are the distribution plans, beyond flacking it from the Web site and being present in app stores.

Google, on the other hand, has its Android platform to push out Propeller, although it all must work as well on Apple’s iPad, which is the dominant tablet on the market.

But just because both Yahoo and Google are big companies is by no means a guarantee of success — think Yahoo 360 or Google Wave or Buzz — and their lateness might be a hindrance.

And, in fact, other news reader apps are much further along. The leader, Flipboard, has already had four million downloads and 50 partnerships with leading publishers.

It also has started to introduce rich advertising products and, perhaps most importantly, has tight social integration with Twitter and Facebook.

There will be social elements on both Yahoo’s Livestand and Google’s Propeller. But news reading will be stressed more, making them more like Pulse, a tiny but highly innovative start-up.

Each of the existing apps will presumably compete by adding on more features. Pulse recently added cross-platform, cross-device syncing, while Flipboard is close to unveiling an iPhone version it has said it was working on.

Yahoo and Google PR declined comment.

Here is the Livestand demo video from February:

San Francisco-based Federated Media Publishing said it has bought Lijit Networks, a smaller online advertising analytics and tools firm.

The price for the Boulder, Colo., start-up — which was founded in 2006 — was undisclosed, but it has received just under $29 million in venture funding from firms such as Foundry Group. Federated said Lijit would continue to operate independently, “but in conjunction.”

In an interview yesterday, Federated CEO Deanna Brown said the buy was to round out offerings for its clients and to better compete in a world where most of the online ads go to the top five players.

“I am excited we can give both publishers and advertisers more tools for engagement and monetization,” she said.

Federated, which lost big social-media news site Mashable earlier this year, also benefits from increased scale and inventory of sites.

Lijit CEO Todd Vernon, who will become EVP of technology at Federated, said that it was ever more important for ad-focused firms on the Web to “deliver the entire stack.”

“Lijit has a core competency in the media business, and combined with FM’s best-in-class sales force, we can offer everything needed to do effective online campaigns,” he said.

Here’s the official press release:

Federated Media Publishing To Acquire Lijit Networks

Combined Entity Will Power More than 77,000 Independent Publishers Across the Web Via Comprehensive Advertising, Analytics and Reader Engagement Tools

SAN FRANCISCO, October 4, 2011 – Federated Media Publishing, which powers the best of the Independent Web, today announced the acquisition of Lijit Networks, Inc. Lijit is a leading provider of advertising services, audience analytics and reader engagement tools for online publishers of all sizes. The combined entity will reach nearly 300 million global unique visitors according to Quantcast.

Lijit, headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, will continue to operate independently but in conjunction with the rest of Federated Media Publishing. Lijit CEO Todd Vernon and COO Walter Knapp will take on corresponding EVP of Technology and SVP of Platform Revenue responsibilities at Federated Media Publishing and will report directly to Federated Media Publishing’s CEO, Deanna Brown. Additionally, Lijit board member Seth Levine from Foundry Group will join the Federated Media Publishing board of directors, effective immediately.

With the addition of Lijit Networks’ existing publisher relationships, Federated Media Publishing will now reach more than 77,000 online publishers and nearly 15,000 expert communities, making it one of the largest companies to power publishing on the Independent Web. The acquisition vastly expands the combined company’s inventory of sites, offering premium advertisers improved scale and reach.

Publishers Will Profit and Flourish

Lijit helps publishers more thoughtfully interact with and better understand their audience by providing analytics and engagement tools that build deeper relationships, lengthen time on site and increase page views. These robust and actionable audience analytics and reader engagement tools leverage intent, behavior and demographics to help publishers of all sizes increase revenue and better engage their readers.

Additionally, the combined advertising services provided by FM and Lijit will give publishers of all sizes a revenue stream that complements existing sales efforts and helps grow and monetize their website businesses, no matter what the size.

Advertisers Can More Easily Analyze and Engage

The combination of Federated Media Publishing’s premium online advertising and conversational marketing programs and Lijit’s proprietary data collection tools will empower advertisers to better understand user intent, contextual relevance and demographic information. And by leveraging the combined entity’s extensive publisher relationships, advertisers will have unprecedented scale on the Independent Web.

Introducing Programmatic Buying to the Independent Web

Programmatic buying is one of the fastest growing trends in digital media and the introduction of Lijit’s robust RTB exchange will equip media buyers with one of the largest platforms available. Over the next few months, Federated Media Publishing and Lijit will develop a series of private exchanges that will highlight leading independent publishers. These exchanges will allow brands to engage active, passionate consumers found in highly conversational online communities and publications, while delivering premium CPM rates via FM’s conversational marketing programs.

Quote

“The Lijit Networks team is just as passionate and committed to powering publishers as we are at Federated Media Publishing and that was a crucial element to this decision,” said Deanna Brown, chief executive officer, Federated Media Publishing. “Our combined relationships, proprietary tools and conversational marketing services will be invaluable to publishers and advertisers alike.”

“Federated Media invented how to leverage authentic voices and engaged conversations that exist in the Independent Web,” said Todd Vernon, founder and CEO of Lijit Networks. “The combination of the two companies is a game changer in the industry that unlocks new opportunities for both companies and our combined publisher network.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111004/federated-media-buys-lijit-networks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110929/the-washington-posts-and-facebook-director-don-graham-talks-about-social-reader-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110929/the-washington-posts-and-facebook-director-don-graham-talks-about-social-reader-video/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:01:27 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=126290

Last week at Facebook’s f8 developers confab, I ran right into my old boss, Washington Post Chairman Don Graham.

While I could go on about what a privilege it was to spend my formative journalism years at the legendary newspaper and how critical its steadfast owners were to exemplifying all that is quality about the media, all Don wanted to talk about was now and the future.

And that would be how to make sure his media company was going to successfully make the transition to social. Thus, he was at f8 not only because he is a longtime board member of Facebook, but because he was eagerly showing off the Washington Post’s nifty new app for the social networking giant called Social Reader.

With the motto, “News. Better With Friends,” it’s an elegantly done version of what other publishers are trying, allowing users to instantly share the stories they have read with friends and also seeing what those friends are reading.

Here’s Don talking about Social Reader and showing it off on his Apple iPad, as well as some choice words about the future of news in general.

Listen, because he’d know:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110929/the-washington-posts-and-facebook-director-don-graham-talks-about-social-reader-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110818/yahoo-loses-longtime-ad-tech-exec-dev-patel/ http://allthingsd.com/20110818/yahoo-loses-longtime-ad-tech-exec-dev-patel/#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:23:11 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=111725

Yahoo has lost another one of its longtime top advertising tech execs, as Advertiser and Publisher Solutions VP Dev Patel ankles out the door.

(I would have posted a photo of him, but the first thousand images I searched for were for the Indian star of “Slumdog Millionaire,” no matter what keywords I put in. Thus, a revolving door.)

Patel came to Yahoo in 2005, after it bought Whereonearth, a local and mobile search start-up where he served as CEO.

Patel has worked on a number of products at Yahoo, most recently its Smart Ads for Homepage offering, which are personalized ad units optimized using user data. It is powered by the Silicon Valley portal’s acquisition of Dapper, which Patel led.

Patel, who worked under Yahoo products head Blake Irving, is reportedly leaving for personal reasons, although others said he was frustrated by its current management. (Or both!)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110818/yahoo-loses-longtime-ad-tech-exec-dev-patel/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110813/heres-what-an-ipad-looked-like-in-1994-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110813/heres-what-an-ipad-looked-like-in-1994-video/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 11:00:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=109556 Yesterday we saw what AT&T thought the future would look like, way back in the early ’90s. Pretty accurate!

Today we can see what newspaper publisher Knight Ridder thought about the future, way back in the early ’90s. Also accurate!

Except for an important part it got wrong.

Here’s a Knight Ridder-produced video from 1994, where the publisher imagines a world in which people consume their news on something very, very similar to an iPad. The tech specs kick in around the 2:20 mark (thanks very much, Richard Raucci):

Tablets will be a whole new class of computer. They’ll weigh under two pounds. They’ll be totally portable. They’ll have a clarity of screen display comparable to ink on paper. They’ll be able to blend text, audio, and graphics together. And they’ll be a part of our daily lives around the turn of the century. We may still use the computer to create information, but we’ll use the tablet to interact with information, reading, watching, listening.

Prescient, no? I don’t knock them for being about a decade early on tablet adoption. Can’t get everything.

If you slog through the video to about the 7:45 mark, though, you’ll find a much less accurate forecast. That’s the part where the newspaper publisher confidently explains that even when people have access to amazing tablet technology, they’ll still rely on newspapers, published in a format that looks very much like the print-and-ink product Knight Ridder was publishing in 1994.

Recall that while the open Web wasn’t mainstream back then — Netscape didn’t release its first browser until the end of the year — the notion of the “information superhighway,” with on-ramps courtesy of AOL and CompuServe, wasn’t new.

But Knight Ridder’s vision of the future assumed that newspapers stay dominant, and they stay looking like newspapers.

“Retaining that look and feel is very important, because people don’t buy generic news. They buy a specific newspaper, with a branded identity,” says the video’s narrator. “For most people, a newspaper is like a friend. It’s somebody you know, who you have come to trust,” adds a Knight Ridder executive, on camera.

And here you can see why the newspaper industry was so very slow to adapt to both the editorial and commercial impact of the Internet. It was smart enough to see the future coming over the hill, but not wise enough to realize it was going to run into it head-on — that technology wouldn’t just change the way information was delivered, but the source of information, and the value of that information.

Seventeen years later, it’s still trying to get its head around the idea.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110813/heres-what-an-ipad-looked-like-in-1994-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110808/another-cool-new-yorker-app-and-this-ones-free/ http://allthingsd.com/20110808/another-cool-new-yorker-app-and-this-ones-free/#comments Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:11:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=106925 Like the New Yorker’s iPad app, but don’t want to pay for it? Here’s a sort-of alternative: The magazine’s new entertainment listings app.

It’s not the New Yorker, but it’s built using the magazine’s intellectual DNA. And instead of the $60 a year the magazine charges for its primary app, this one is 100 percent free.

The “Goings On” app, which will work on both iPhone and Android handsets, is pretty much exactly what you’d expect: The magazine’s weekly listings of New York art exhibits, concerts, etc., tethered to an interactive map.

There are a few extra goodies, too, like audio recordings from New Yorker authors that will work as walking tours: Food writer Calvin Trillin will lead listeners through his favorite eateries and stores, and architecture critic Paul Goldberger navigates the city’s amazing elevated High Line park.

All of which sounds cool, if not groundbreaking. I got a very brief demo last week, but have no idea how it will work in the real world.

It’s worth noting that this is another example of a magazine publisher experimenting with an app that isn’t a straightforward replica of one of its titles. Instead, the app leverages the New Yorker’s brand and its intellectual property to create a new standalone product.

In this case, the magazine is turning that into revenue via an ad deal — MasterCard will be the app’s sole sponsor, via a package deal that also gets the brand into the print magazine — but Conde and other publishers have tried charging customers for standalones, too.

Very good bet that we’ll see more of these from Conde and its competitors, and that they’ll continue to play around with price points. Encouraging experiments.

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