Rambler Media has partnered with Hiro Media, an Israeli developer of ad-supported video-download technology, whose software allows to dynamically select advertisements that are suited to demographical information users provide when they sign-up for the service.

Rambler also agreed with TV channel TNT and TV series producer Starmedia to offer 400 hours of video content from their libraries starting from May 2008. It will increase to 1,000 hours of video content by the fall 2008.

The advertisers will be offered to buy advertisements at $350 per 1,000 video views. The initial monthly audience of Rambler Cinema is expected to reach 1 million users. Rambler Vision, a video sharing service of Rambler has 1.8 million monthly users, according to the company.

Please check the Quintura site search widget in the right sidebar on ReadWriteWeb. The widget increases user engagement on ReadWriteWeb as compared to a regular search box. As an example of displaying brand advertisements, we have recently embedded graphical ads next to keywords in the widget’s search cloud.

Odnoklassniki.ru has 15 million registered accounts and 5 million daily users. The social network is now growing by 100 thousand new accounts per day, mostly registered by new users from Russian regions. The site’s name is translated into English as “Classmates”. The site is sort of a blend between Classmates.com and Hot or Not. The company currently uses 140 computer servers for its service. It sells 728 x 90 top banners and 240 x 400 side banners at CPM rates of $0.7 - 1.7.

Odnoklassniki.ru was ranked the 7th online property in Russia with reach of 30% of the Russian internet audience in a recent comScore study.

In contrast, the 2nd largest Russian social networking site Vkontakte.ru, which is similar to Facebook and has over 10 million registered accounts, does not sell online advertising. The site recently started generating revenues from online recruitment services.

The recent drop in a number of active blogs in Russia can be explained by a growing popularity of online social networks.

I think that the Sphere investors sold the company just in time. Sphere was among the first companies who started providing related links but the real business is to help selling contextual advertisements more efficiently. The company was founded three years ago and raised more than $4 million over two rounds. The acquisition price is rumored to be $25 million.

I have not seen if Sphere introduced any innovative online advertising alongside its content related widget. If they have done, I think the price would have been much higher.

The acquisition shows that there is a growing demand among content owners and web publishers to make site search and navigation easier and increase loyalty of users. The publishers also want to better monetize the traffic by increasing page-views and clicks-through. By reportedly increasing page-views, Sphere only touched that demand.

The real sweet cake is to help web publishers to better monetize user traffic through new type of on-site contextual advertisements.

As an example, check the graphical ads in the interactive site search cloud that we just implemented on ReadWriteWeb.

Fabrice also admitted that OLX acquired a Russian free classifieds site FreeAds.ru. The deal should have closed in the summer 2007 when the site started forwarding its visitors to OLX.ru

OLX faces major completion in Russia from Slando.ru (part of a free online classifieds network in Eastern Europe owned by eBay via Kijiji), Avito.ru, a free classifieds site owned by the yellow-pages business Kontakt East Holding, and IRR.ru, online version of classifieds newspaper Iz Ruk v Ruki (From Hand to Hand) owned by Trader Media East.

OLX.ru has 300 thousand monthly site visitors, Slando.ru - 700 thousand, Avito.ru - 1 million, and IRR.ru has 2.5 million visitors per month, according to Internet statistics service LiveInternet.ru.

Avito recently stroke a deal with Russia’s leading blogging business LiveJournal to advertise classifieds from Avito on LiveJournal.ru pages. By clicking Avito ads, the LiveJournal visitors go a special online auction page LiveJournal-Bazar.

While the largest free classifieds site Craigslist (partly owned by eBay) lacks presence in developing Internet markets as well as web 2.0 features, it leaves room for its emerging competitors such as OLX to win in those markets, including in Russia.

The new search on Rambler has become visual and vertical. For easy navigation, the search results are clustered into four categories: Internet, Top 100, News, and Wikipedia, all marked in different colors. There is also a thumbnail of image next to a search result. In case of a product-related search, the two additional categories will be displayed: Prices and Reviews.

More than 37 million unique users visited Rambler.ru in February 2008. With some 300 million monthly searches and growing, Rambler could join a list of top 10 search engines globally. Rambler Media reported today that its revenues reached $69 million in 2007, up 125% from 2006.

Quintura Kids is mostly used in the elementary schools and public libraries in the U.S. Several hundred school and teacher websites linked to the site since its launch in March 2007. Quintura Kids has 68 percent returning visitors and 60 percent of visitors come to the site directly, according to data from Google Analytics.

The search engine can be easily embedded onto any web or blog page by clicking the Embed it! link in the top-right corner of the screen and copying & pasting an embed code onto the page.

In June 2007, Quintura Kids was ranked the highest among the kid-friendly search engines by Search Engine Watch. The search engines for kids were ranked in five categories including a visual appeal to a child; relevance to a child, based on chosen searches; commercial vs. educational, with the educational slant creating a higher score; and ease of navigation for 7-10 year olds.

See also the news on AltSearchEngines.

Next, we plan to embed graphics in an interactive search cloud on Quintura Kids to make it even easier to navigate the Internet.

Versita was launched in 2001. The company publishes scientific electronic journals and provides content publishers with electronic publishing technology solutions.

Versita distributes its publications globally in partnership with a leading international scientific publisher Springer.

The new offer from Quintura shall deliver the following advantages to site and blog owners.

• Bring additional visitors: Any site or blog can now attract additional visitors from Quintura.com who can see its site’s favorite icon (favicon) in the Quintura search cloud. By clicking the favicon, the searchers on Quintura.com will go to the web-site or blog.

• Increase brand awareness: The favicon is a part of any site’s visual identity. It is more catchy than text and thus brings additional attention to the site.

After embedding Quintura search widget to its site, a site owner can select a keyword related to the site and display a favorite icon (favicon) next to the selected keyword in the search cloud on Quintura.com for a week.

The favicon will have direct hyperlink to the site. When someone makes a search for a topic related to context of the selected keyword, both keyword and favicon will be displayed in the Quintura search cloud on Quintura.com.

The new offer Happy Spring! from Quintura is available on http://special.quintura.com

About Quintura

Quintura is a visual-based search engine for browsing and discovery-type search. Quintura has won the Alternative Search Engine of the Year, 2007 award from AltSearchEngines.com. Quintura was featured in both International and Russian editions of Newsweek in November 2007. The company is currently backed by Mangrove Capital Partners, the first institutional investors in Skype. Quintura has software development operations in the Moscow region of Russia.