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Two Russian investment groups have acquired a 63.3 percent stake in Ukranian web portal Meta, in a deal believed to be worth around $3 million. Russian Funds Investment Group and Digital Sky Technologies, an internet fund, contributed equally in the general-purpose service, which operates search, news, email and other features and reached 1.5 million users last year, according to the Kiyv Post. They will now invest a further $1 million toward improving the search functionality sufficiently to compete with Ukranian versions of Google and Russia’s Yandex, the Post says.

German media/magazine group Burda Media, though its arm Burda Digital Ventures, has taken a stake in local video and photo portal Sevenload. Burda bought one fifth of Sevenload’s shares, though other terms were not disclosed. The media company has been buying small stakes in online companies since last year.
More info in the release here.
Related:
-- Burda Media Buys 30 Percent Stake in German Nightlife Community Site
-- German Magazine Giant Burda Media Planning Major Net Acquisitions Abroad

German travel community site Cosmotourist has received backing from Dr. Christoph Roeck as an investor and business angel. Roeck left his post at product search site Pangora end of February. He will be joining his former co-managing director and founder of the Pangora, Constantin Wunn, now the managing director of Munich-based Cosmotourist. The amount of financing that Roeck will be bringing with him to Cosmotourist was not disclosed. Release

UK News publisher DMGT more than doubled its digital revenue in 2006/07, on the back of web advertising gains. The publisher behind the Daily Mail and London’s Evening Standard newspapers posted a 57 percent online hike across the group, according to figures running to April 1 and released today. Advertising revenue from DMGT’s Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND) subsidiary is up 48 percent (or 141 percent if you factor in acquisitions). The increases will have come in part from the glut of recruitment, dating and other classifieds sites AND bought in the last year.
Most surprising, however, is an up-turn in print ad performance—despite suffering a woeful couple of years, national display ad revenue increased four percent in the last five months, although regional classified ads are down three percent on last year. GCap yesterday reported the ad market in radio, too, had begun to turn a corner.
- Wed ads surge: Online remains the fastest grower, however. According to an Internet Advertising Bureau study out today, UK internet ad spend overtook that in newspapers for the first time last year, growing 41.2 percent to break the £2 billion ($3.9 billion) barrier, while newspaper ads grew just 0.2 percent to £1.9 billion ($3.7 billion). Google made up 43 percent of that, according to The Guardian.

Universal Music Group will become a strategic global investor in Alliance Trace Media, owner of Trace TV, a French TV network and digital platform that is aimed at the urban youth market in countries throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
While financial terms between the two were not revealed, Universal will provide global music/video rights, a weekly slot on IMF—the International Music Feed, Universal’s 24-hour cable/satellite channel, as well as cross promotion and marketing support. Universal and Trace will also sell urban music and mobile content in China.
Universal’s backing will help Trace accelerate expansion its existing operations across the web, cable, satellite, radio, IPTV and mobile platforms internationally. It hopes to launch in the US market by the end of this year or early 2008 at the latest. Release

Ericsson is set to take full control of Norwegian digital video company Tandberg Television after winning the support of over 90 percent of shareholders, in a deal that paves the way for its emergence into IPTV. Headquartered in Southampton, England, Tandberg makes compression and on-demand features for digital broadcasting. Ericsson had been courting the company since February, when CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg said IPTV would be “the biggest networked multimedia opportunity going forward”, bringing Ericsson new customers in the shape of cable and satellite operators. The deal involved a 106 kroner ($17) share offer.

The season of website and service upgrades in UK:
-- Sky says it will do a massive overhaul of its digital offer. The new portal, possibly launching this summer, will put ina lot of NEws Corp content, and will be going head to head with competitors MSN, Yahoo, Virgin Media and AOL, the story says.
-- Financial Times’ website, pretty crappy even after the redesign in 2002, will go through a new round of redesign. NMA does a suck up: “The paper’s parent company Pearson has sanctioned a thorough redesign of the hugely successful website. It’s understood that this will be the biggest change since the last, widely praised redesign in 2002.” “Hugely successful” and “widely praised”, says the “award-winning” journalist. Wow.
-- Reuters is investing in excess of $11 million in upgrading the underlying technology platform supporting its sites. The move is to enable the company to better embrace Web 2.0 features like video, blogs, and social networking. Full migration of the Reuters US and UK homepages and news channels to the new platform will take place over the next few months, with other global sites to follow.

Bertelsmann will have a $8 billion warchest with which to make digital (and other kinds of) media acquisitions through to 2010. Announcing annual figures, Europe’s largest media company said profit more than doubled in 2006. Now it is dropping a self-imposed ban on acquisitions (introduced to cut debt resulting from the buy-back of a 25 percent stake), and is focused on buying itself success in the new media ecosystem. The cash will be free from next year, if debt falls as expected.
- CFO Thomas Rabe: “We will again have financial scope of between $1.6 billion and $2 billion per year for acquisitions and $935 million for other ongoing investments”.
- Times: “Gunther Thielen, the company’s outgoing chief executive, said that there were no obvious gaps in Bertelsmann’s existing divisions. However, the company wanted to target fresh assets that ultimately it could integrate. When pressed to clarify target areas, he said that it was difficult to identify which new-media businesses would be sustainable: ‘Those who are too early will be punished and so will those who are too late.’”
Bertlesmann will not target telecoms infrastructure providers, however, according to Reuters.
Ten percent of the acquisition budget will go toward a private equity fund that will target media companies and is joined by Citigroup Private Equity and Morgan Stanley Principal Investments. Amongst Bertelsmann’s boldest online acquisitions was its failed purchase of Napster in 2002. Whilst the group has effective television, magazine and book divisions, it is seen as needing to up its game on the net once more.
Related:-
- Bertelsmann Forms $63 Million Venture Fund; Sarnoff Heading It
- Bertelsmann’s New Web-Friendly CEO; Deals Coming?

Motorola’s European marketing director Simon Thompson has joined Lastminute.com as chief marketing officer. A Motorola spokesperson, speaking to mad.co.uk, said: “Thompson, who has held the post of European marketing director at Motorola for the past year, has resigned from Motorola to take on a new post. [Neil] Stuart, currently marketing lead for the EMEA & India region, will be taking over Thompson’s responsibilities in Europe from the beginning of April.”
Thompson, who was responsible for our line of the day during our Online Publishers’ Association coverage from London this month, had spearheaded an imminent campaign for Motorola’s Rizr launch and, previously, as Honda marketing director, worked on the “impossible dream” campaign.
Related:-
-- OPA London: Line Of The Day

The overwhelming consensus among 350 global magazine and newspaper executives at a global media conference last week, Magazine 2.0, at the Hannover Congress Centrum in Germany: there is no profit in going digital.
Taking the pulse of the conference, which was held March 14-15, the IHT reports that only a small number of attendees raised their hands when asked if they were making more than 3 percent of their sales online.
Even in the case of Meredith Corp., which said it was gaining “significant” profit from its 32 websites, related to magazine properties like Better Homes & Gardens and Family Circle, it was largely through advertising and subscription referrals, not the digital sale of what is typically a publishing company’s chief product—text.
Still, aside from commiserating, some publishers offered strategies for transforming their online businesses to become profit generators – at some point in the not-too-near future:
-- One example: during a restructuring that began last year Hachette, a unit of Lagardère, began selling online subscriptions to 200 of its magazines in August. So far, 20,000 consumers had taken up the offer. But Hachette is making sales, not profit. Hachette sells access to digital facsimiles of four magazines for just $13 a month. Consumers download the magazines, which are enhanced with embedded audio and video, and read them offline. They can switch the four titles each month and there is no yearly commitment. Hachette will expand its online sales to 500 titles in France and, later this year, in Britain.
Since users are used to free newspaper and magazine content, there was not a great deal of hope among the attendees that such a path could be widely adopted. So until someone else comes up with a better way, the industry will wait for the electronics industry to save it by developing a hand-held newspaper and magazine reader. 
Related:
-- Hachette To Shut Down ‘Premiere’; Will Try Online Only
-- @ Media Summit: Online Publishers Hope To Compete With and Attract Advertisers With Customization
-- Lagardere Media To Cut Up To 1,000 Jobs; Online Big Focus

An interesting but ultimately minor move from Lycos Europe, the independent company (not part of Lycos USA....partly owned by Bertelsmann of Germany and Telefonica of Spain). It cannot enter U.S. using its own once-famous name, as Lycos U.S. is here, and now owned by Korean portal company Daum. So it is using the brand and services of Jubii, its Danish search and community business, and will launch here in a month or so, reports IHT.
The service combines search, e-mail, chat, photo and file storage, phone texting, blogging, Internet phoning and other Web 2.0 type service. Lycos U.S. here partly positions itself similarly, so will be interesting to see how that plays out. Lycos Europe claims 31 million unique users on sites it owns as well as partner sites; about half of its users are in Britain, Germany and France, with the rest scattered around the world.
Interestingly, Lycos Europe has had a single CEO throughout its 10-year history, rare for an online consumer service...Christoph Mohn is the CEO and part of the family that runs Bertelsmann, the media giant that owns Random House, Gruner + Jahr, RTL and part of Lycos Europe. His parents, Liz and Reinhard Mohn, are the driving forces on the company’s supervisory board, which Christoph Mohn just joined last month.
There is a line of thought that Bertelsmann needs the company for its eventual Internet strategy, and this would possibly have implications in U.S. as well.