The media sector is now out of the crunch, as far as private equity investments in to the sector go, according to financial advisory BDO. Its poll of 50 UK private equity funds and 100 P.E.-backed businesses says 2010 will see a “resurgence”... —24 percent of private equity houses say…

Web newspaper views may be petering out, but the broadband boom of that last few years has left us with one big growth opportunity in particular - sticking ads against online videos. The Association of Online Publishers says its members, in a “straw poll” at a recent AOP event, are…

Here’s why Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is advertising Bing on UK TV: it’s barely making the tiniest dent in Google’s search leadership. Though Google (NSDQ: GOOG) piled on eight tenths of the 617 million additional searches Brits made since Bing launched in June, Bing took just four percent of them, according…

More consolidation in the digital marketing space: U.S.-based agency One to One Interactive has acquired fhios, a London-based marketing firm. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. This is the fifth M&A deal for OTO in the last five years. This deal will give the firm an expanded presence…

The popularity of Auntie’s online broadcast service shows no signs of plateauing. January UK requests doubled from last year to 120.3 million (100.5 million if you ignore its Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) implementation)...                     iPlayer’s come a long way since it…

Today’s *ABC* figures for consumer magazine sales figures for July to December show several individual stories - Wired UK debuted with 48,275, Private Eye is at an 18-year high. But the big picture is one of serious decline. Taking a step back, I delved in to ABC’s archives and processed…

Game publishers’ financials had already told us the video games industry is in something of a slump - now complete sales figures from the world’s three biggest markets show us how much... Game sales in the U.S., UK and Japan fell eight percent in 2009 to 379.3 million, according to…

Global digital music revenue has grown 20,900 percent since the music business started keeping count in 2003 - but it still needs government protection to grow further, says the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the industry’s main trade umbrella. 2009 digital sales hit $4.2 billion, or 27 percent…

UK media M&A deals should bounce back this year after hitting their lowest level since the post-dot.com crash of early 2002, PricewaterhouseCoopers reckons. Number of deals fell 36 percent last year to just 29, their worth down from €4.1 billion to €2.7 billion, according to PwC’s Media M&A Insights 2010…

What’s the opposite of “recession”? UK internet ad budgets were up for the second consecutive quarter in Q409, as the web continued to take share of outlay from other media, according to the IPA/BDO Bellwether. The online increases (10.4 percent for internet, 11.5 percent for search) were the most pronounced…

—VOD stats 20 percent of net users surveyed by TalkTalk said they watched or downloaded TV from the net over Christmas, for an average 2.5 hours. 28 percent watched YouTube, 19 percent played games, 57 percent emailed, 40 percent did social networking. Via TalkTalk. —OiNK clearance: A court cleared Alan…

—Spotify limit: Some labels are turning their streaming-music scepticism in to action - La Roux’s Polydor is running her eponymous debut album only to Spotify’s premium customers, not the freeloaders. Its contents are also limited on other sites like We7. Presumably Polydor gets better returns from guaranteed subs than from…

2009 Official Charts Company figures from the BPI show unit sales 15 percent up from 2008 to a decade high of 281.6 million, spurred by digital singles… —Digital resurrected the singles market in 2004. Virtually all of the 152.7 million singles sales were digital last year (98 percent, or 149.7…

Radio’s Rajar measuring group is nothing if not optimistic. After surveying just 977 people, who have already told it they listen to online radio, it concludes… —“One third (33.9 percent) of the UK’s adult population (15+), or 17.4 million people, claim to have ever listened to the radio via the…

Is the upswing in effect? Three industry forecasts are raising their expectations for next year’s ad spend… Magna Global is predicting a six-percent rise, GroupM just 0.8 percent, and ZenithOptimedia is raising its cross-media global advertising forecast for the first time in 18 months, projecting a 0.9 percent 2010 uplift…

Information on teens’ behavior, as we saw from the coverage of Morgan Stanley’s efforts to map the zeitgeist earlier this year via the musings of a 15-year-old intern, is in great demand.  It’s not only useful to baffled parents, it’s also crucial for content providers, advertisers and marketers seeking to…

Most online publishers (61 percent) refrained from reducing the price on their advertising rate cards, despite the ad downturn and rising web inventory, according to a new survey. Sixty-one percent of publishers held rates steady in the year to September and 22 percent increased rates, according to Econsultancy’s Online Publishers…

Aggregate UK newspaper site traffic has rebounded from a spring-and-summer lull, despite falling audiences at some of the most popular sites, thanks to good showings from some of the lesser of the bunch.

Online newspapers’ dirty little secret? The big traffic growth may be tailing off... August unique users to the seven sites that file monthly ABCe stats came in at 139.8 million - 4.3 percent down from July, and 7.1 percent below June’s record high of 150.59 million.