Adknowledge paid $11.6 million for MIVA Media, plus assumption of certain balance sheet liabilities, and subject to certain retained assets and liabilities and post-closing adjustments. MIVA Media, an advertising network, was founded in 1999 and includes the Espotting and Findwhat.com brands. Another of MIVA, Inc.’s divisions, MIVA Direct, was not part of the transaction and continues to be owned and operated by MIVA.

Adknowledge has been busy, picking up acquisitions that were focused on social media, including Cubics, Lookery, and social analytics company Adonomics.com. The company also purchased Mediarun, a display ad network.

MIVA, Inc. has reduced total headcount from 129 on December 31 2008 to approximately 50, which includes the transfer of approximately 75 MIVA Media and certain corporate staff to Adknowledge.

“Adknowledge’s financial strength and strong bottom-line performance have allowed us to make strategic acquisitions,” said Scott Lynn, CEO of Adknowledge, in a statement. “We plan to quickly combine MIVA Media’s strong industry position and experience with Adknowledge’s core predictive targeting technology to improve results for MIVA Media’s advertisers.”

Adknowledge continues to evaluate additional acquisition opportunities. “Our advertiser and targeting platforms enable us to easily ‘plug-in’ acquisitions into our infrastructure and recognize immediate synergy,” said Lynn.

MIVA, Inc. intends to use the proceeds from the sale of the MIVA Media business to focus on the expansion of its ALOT product portfolio. MIVA, Inc.’s common stock continues to trade on the NASDAQ under the trading symbol ‘MIVA’. MIVA, Inc. intends to change its name and ticker symbol in the near future.

– Express your opinion, comment below.

Under the deal, MIVA Direct will use Meebo’s technology for real-time social interactions between users via chat rooms that are promoted across ALOT Toolbar and ALOT Home. Meebo is serving social ads into the technology and MIVA Direct will earn a share of the revenue generated from these ad units.

“Since launching ALOT, we’ve been building up users across a broad range of different verticals,” said Chris Dessi, MIVA Direct’s VP of Sales and Business Development. “Our ALOT Toolbar for Recipes, for example, currently has over 335,000 live users. We believe there are significant potential benefits in offering vertically focused chat rooms that enable these like-minded users to communicate directly with each other, and believe that Meebo is a great application to help us kick-start this process.”

In addition to the expected revenue it will generate, it is also designed to extend ALOT’s mission of ‘Making the Internet Easy’ by delivering further value to the brand’s existing vertical audiences. MIVA Direct is the toolbar, homepage and content division of digital media and advertising company MIVA.

 – Express your opinion, comment below.

Kate Burns is joining Bebo as European vice president and managing director (the hire is close on the heels of Bebo’s president Joanna Shields’ promo to president of AOL’s People Networks). Burns hails from Dailymotion, which she joined just four months ago.

Adap.tv, creators of OneSource, a platform that helps publishers monetize online video content, has hired Dakota Sullivan as its vice president, marketing and product. She will run the company’s global marketing communications and product strategies. Previously, Sullivan was chief marketing officer at BlueLithium.

MIVA Direct, the homepage, toolbar and content arm of digital media company MIVA, has appointed Mark Ribaudo as vice president of direct marketing. He will be responsible for direct marketing and advertising across MIVA Direct’s portfolio of toolbars, homepages and destination sites. Ribaudo joins the company from Scholastic, where he was group director of Internet marketing.