Penguin Victims Outed | Voracious Google Eats Biz of Travel Advertisers | Newspaper Ad Revenues Shockingly Lower

Search:

• Google might be eating its own travel advertising market, with a 19 percent decline in travel paid search coinciding nicely with Google's launch of Google Flight Search and Hotel Finder, two online apps that essentially take business away from its own advertisers.
• Penguin 2.0 victimshave been enumerated. Porn sites and game sites didn't fair well, which may be an indicator that it is correctly targeting sites that have used impure optimization tactics. The update also appears to continue the long run of algorithm updates that reward Huffingtonpost.com - up about 10 percent in keyword visibility - making it even more so the news site that ate the news industry (and spawning wannabes).
• The FTC is looking into whether it should look into alleged anticompetitive behavior by Google, particularly around the question of whether it is attempting to bundle services in such a way as to abuse its dominance in search advertising.

Publishing:

• Newspaper revenues, once at close to $50 billion just back in 2005, have shrunk to about $19 billion in 2012, according to that industry's main trade group. Online circulation revenues are not coming close to closing the gap. Last year total advertising, including online, fell $1.7 billion and circulation revenue rose only half a billion dollars during the most active year yet for newspapers moving to pay walls.

Finance:

• Tremor Video filed for an IPO, making it the second major online media firm to do so very recently and perhaps indicating a fresher breeze at the backs of established digital media firms.