So, for example, if you follow Burger King and Wendy’s, you might see a Promoted Tweet (labeled so) from McDonald’s saying that Big Macs are on the dollar menu.

This greatly expands the reach of Promoted Tweets and should attract more brand dollars. Also it seems that Twitter is rolling it out slowly enough as not to alienate its user base. Originally, Promoted Tweets only appeared in searches and on promoted trends, but last month Twitter began serving them in the timelines of advertisers’ followers in limited frequency.

To judge the initial reaction, Twitter is only introducing feature to a single-digit percentage of its global user base.

“We are carefully measuring how users respond to and engage with these Tweets,” a spokeperson wrote by email. “Based on this response, we will roll this capability out to a wider audience in the coming months.”

But that was before Google rolled out the Panda search algorithm update between February and April, which somehow (magically?) gave many of Demand’s media properties (eHow most notably) a kick down search results pages. Demand’s stock has followed with a steady decline since a $27 peak in April, falling as low as $7.65 in the turmoil over the last week — it’s about a 60% tumble since the IPO in January.

Source: Google Finance

However, today the stock is back above $10 and climbing following Demand’s second-quarter 2011 earnings report, which cited better revenue than the prior year and smaller losses compared to both the Q210 and Q111. Plus, the company made a few choice acquisitions and extended its global advertising relationship with Google as a major AdSense partner for another three years.

Demand’s second-quarter revenue (excluding traffic acquisition costs) increased 34 percent year over year to $76.6 million ($57.3 million in Q210), above analysts’ expectations of $73.9 million. This was higher than first quarter revenue of $76.3 million. Flagship website eHow accounted for 32% of revenue.

Reading the writing on the wall (“PANDA” in giant block letters), Demand has expanded its media array through widely-publicized publishing partnerships with celebrities such as Tyra Banks and Rachael Ray. Demand shared its estimate that Google algorithm changes would affect revenue by 6% in 2011.

In addition, the company has acquired two companies to bolster its marketing initiatives: IndieClick offers advertisers custom rich media ad units intentionally places to reach the much-valued 18-34-year-old demographic, while RSS Graffiti enables brands to build custom social content feeds with advanced sharing controls.

Demand is still struggling with operational losses, which were at $0.9 million compared to a $1 million loss in Q210 and a $4.2 million loss in Q111. Net loss was $2.4 million, compared to a $1.9 million loss in Q210 and a $5.6 million loss in the prior quarter. Net loss per share was $0.03 ($0.75 in Q210, $0.94 in Q111).

As for guidance for the third quarter of 2011, Demand expects revenue to be between $78.5 and $82.5 million, with losses from operations between $5.8 and $4.3 million. For fiscal 2011 on the whole, the company is estimating revenue to come in between $321.5-$329.5 million, with losses from operation falling somewhere between $10.1 and $7.1 million.

“Turning the corner” may be an exaggeration, but Demand seems to have proven to wary investors that it’s still alive, bringing in revenue and planning for a bolder future.

Sure, compared with last year’s loss of a little over $1 billion in the second quarter (mainly due to restructuring costs due to the spinoff from Time Warner and a goodwill impairment charge), AOL’s net loss of $11.8 million for the quarter doesn’t seem like the last nail in the coffin. And with an advertising revenue growth of 5% year over year to $319 million, with display in particular up 14%, it appears that AOL has a reason to .

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said in a statement that the company’s return to global advertising growth is “another meaningful step forward in the comeback of the AOL brand.”

But AOL is far from regaining its former status as one of the world’s most popular online destinations. Despite a domestic display increase of 16%, international display fell 10%. With subscription revenue down 23% and a decline in search and contextual revenue of $17.6 million, it seems that the company has taken a few steps back.

Albeit in this zombie-state, AOL remains optimistic, highlighting its Huffington Post Media Group that saw the number of unique visitors surpass 30 million and The New York Times in May, according to comScore.

Armstrong also addressed the recent departure of Jeff Levick, the ad chief he personally recruited from Google, and his replacement with Ned Brody. “I expect [Brody] to eliminate the needless operational friction that has prevented us from moving at the speed we want,” he said. “There is no strategy shift. Double underline, double highlight, double yellow.”

Yahoo! believes it has found the culprit for the quarter’s lackluster U.S. sales, which started softening in June soon after Yahoo!’s Investor Day meeting. At that get-together, Yahoo! announced and executed a rehaul of its U.S. sales organization structure, which included changes in leadership and huge turnover at the field sales level — far bigger turnover than the company was expecting.

“[W]ithout our sales force operating at full capacity, many of the ad units we would typically sell on a guaranteed or premium basis were, instead, run through the exchange as nonpremium inventory at far lower prices,” said CFO Timothy Morse on the conference call.

In particular, Morse noted that guaranteed placements on Yahoo!’s primest real estate, the homepage, were way down in the second quarter compared to the prior year.

However, display advertisers looking to buy premium Yahoo! inventory for cheap through the Right Media Exchange may have missed their chance as CEO Carol Bartz said that the sales ranks refilled these positions with a lot of new sales hires (Yahoo! doesn’t just lay off people?) and that Yahoo! is planning to build an even larger salesforce, armed with better tools and training.

“With our massive user base, too often it was easy to fall back on pitching Yahoo!’s huge reach and scale,” Bartz said. “But selling on reach and scale alone leaves meaningful revenue opportunities on the table. We need a sales organization that can craft customized solutions and creative executions because this is what distinguishes Yahoo! from our competitors in display.”

Third quarter guidance estimated flat display revenue to account for hiring and training efforts for the sales force, also signaling that Yahoo! will not meet its 13% to 16% long-term display growth target for 2011. Bartz said the company is “committed to getting back into that range next year.”

Once the ace in Yahoo’s advertising hole, it appears both Facebook and Google will bring in more display revenue this year than the beleaguered portal. However, that’s fitting for the repeated theme of the Yahoo! saga: caught in a constant state of organizational flux, the promised turnaround is always around the corner… But why does it feel like the corner keeps shifting further away?

Sound kinda high to you? That’s ’cause you’re thinking Amurika first — Gartner predicts Asia-Pacific and Japan will account for 49.2% of global mobile ad revenue this year, and 33.6% of the $20.6 billion expected come 2015.

But don’t feel like you’re falling behind, American mobile marketers — by that time North American mobile ad revenue will account for 28% of all revenue, beating out Western Europe, which only takes 25%.

You also have to consider that in many Asian countries, personal computers are not the norm — residents use their phones for connecting to the Internet, and thus that’s where advertisers reach them. More Westerners are starting to do the same, which is why we should see an inflation in mobile marketing budgets in the other hemisphere.

“Mobile search, which includes paid positioning on maps and various forms of augmented reality, all of which can be informed by location, will spearhead mobile ad spending,” predicts Stephanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner. “Mobile display, which includes both standard Mobile Marketing Association banner formats and non-standard rich media and interactive formats, will continue to be closely divided between in-app and mobile Web (in-browser) placements, reflecting consumer usage.”

However, mobile advertising budgets are going to remain a drop in the bucket — by 2015, mobile ads will account for a little more than 4% of advertising budgets, up from 0.5% in 2010 but still not much.

Since 2008, revenue has tended to drop off significantly for online advertising after the holiday season, just like it does for traditional advertising. And since 2010 marked the new high-water point for revenue at $26 billion, such an impressive quarter is a good omen for 2011 on the whole.

David Silverman, partner at PwC. “These numbers indicate that the interactive advertising field hasn’t simply bounced back since the recession; it’s growing with dynamic energy.”

Unfortunately, the IAB only offers a drilldown of revenue by marketing sector every half-year, so can’t we look at those figures next to the ones released by IDC yesterday that suggested display revenue is growing at a faster rate than search.

It’s actually the first time in Internet history that Yahoo! has been knocked out of the top spot — surely not an event they’re celebrating in Y-town.

The Google Display Network benefitted from both increased display spend and a nice bump in revenue — its percentage of display revenue share increased from 13.3% in 4Q10 to 14.7% in 1Q11. Yahoo!’s share, on the other hand, declined from 13.6% to 12.3% over the same time period.

IDC’s Karsten Weide analyzes:

“We expect further pressure on traditional display ad publishers such as Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL. GDN for now does not threaten them directly since their primary client base are brand advertisers, while the GDN for now mostly attracts SMBs. But that may change, and when that happens, the old stalwarts’ lumbering sales organizations will have to compete with GDN’s ultra-effective automated sales interface.”

While Facebook already serves far more display impressions than either Google or Yahoo, its ad revenue is so low because the impressions are so cheap. Eventually, with improved targeting and smarter products, CPMs and CPCs will go up and the social network could come dominate the space in terms of revenue. Facebook’s primary advertisers are those same local SMBs that boosted GDN’s revenue.

In general, worldwide spend increased by 14.3% year over year — from $15.9 billion in 1Q10 to $18.2 billion in 1Q11. In the U.S. alone, the pop was 14.2% — from $7.1 billion in 1Q10 to $8.1 billion in 1Q11. IDC estimates quarter-over-quarter increases of 13.3% to reach $8.3 billion in 2Q11, and a 13.8% bump for full-year 2011, reaching $34.6 billion versus $30.4 billion in 2010.

Also interesting, revenue from display advertising is growing at a faster rate than search — display revenue accounted for 33.3% of online revenue compared with 29% two years ago (remember the dark times?). Search’s share of online ad revenue declined to 48.7% versus 53.4% two years ago.

Twitter seemed pretty desperate to circumvent UberMedia, which had apparently been in talks with TweetDeck to set up a rival microblogging service. Perhaps Twitter is scared of UberMedia CEO Bill Gross, who is also CEO of Idealab and the founder Compete, Picasa (photo service acquired by Google) and Overture (search company acquired by Yahoo!) among others.

Since the beginning of 2011, the company (which changed its name from PostUp in January) has acquired major Twitter clients UberTwitter and EchoFon. UberMedia tools account for 11% of all tweets sent, which has made Twitter nervous. In what could be viewed as an exercise in power, in February it briefly cut off a few UberMedia clients briefly for API violations.

In February UberMedia had all but acquired TweetDeck when Twitter rushed in with an unsolicited counter offer that waylaid the deal. Understandably, Twitter doesn’t want one company controlling more than 20% of its ecosystem, but it doesn’t actually need Tweetdeck.  It’s up in the air what parts of the social media reader will remain active (the client also monitors feeds from other social networks) or if the service will get shut down entirely.

Some speculate UberMedia was talking about building a Twitter rival just in case the microblogger kicked its clients to the curb permanently, but Gross is ambitious. I’ve been writing a lot lately about Twitter’s grim revenue prospects, but it seems UberMedia has found some clever ways to monetize the Twitter stream.

Considering there’s a lot of discrepancy on how active Twitter users are (Cornell University and Yahoo! Research suggested a mere 10,000 users are responsible for half of all tweets), would it be worthwhile for UberMedia to start up a Twitter competitor — one that would have better opportunities for advertisers?

The vast amount of social media ad dollars will continue to go to display, which is expected to see $7.7 billion in spend by 2015. Non-display revenue — Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts and all the other stuff of Twitter advertising — will grow to $600 million in 2015. Apparently non-display didn’t make squat in 2010 — according to BIA/Kelsey, display accounted for all 2010 social media revenue though other sources have reported Twitter’s 2010 revenue to be around $45 million.

Previously, eMarketer predicted that Twitter would bring in $150 million in 2011 and $250 million in 2012, so BIA’s prediction doesn’t seem very far off. I can’t be the only one thinking, “That’s it?” But last week I commented that Twitter’s beta text ads would bring in incremental revenue at best — there is no Twitter ad product that promises exponential revenue growth, something that’s ever-more haunting since North American user growth stalled a while ago.

As Twitter’s valuation keeps skyrocketing, it’s getting tougher to turn a blind eye to these grim revenue estimates.

How are you going to get to a quarter billion in revenue? Yes, geotargeting for Promoted Tweets is nice, but I don’t see brands chomping at the bit. And branded pages are a cool idea, but are you going to charge for them? Possibly follow the Facebook Page advertising model?

And now you’re testing a new revenue product — third-party text ads that appear below the trending topics column. Well, that’s a smart use of dead space, but we’re talking incremental revenue at best.

There’s another problem, buddy — sure Vice President of International Strategy Katie Stanton just boasted about 200 million accounts, but that doesn’t equal 200 million users. The microblogger’s zombie problem is right out of “Night of the Living Dead.”

Last month, Cornell University and Yahoo! Research suggested 0.05% of its users are responsible for half of the tweets — a little math figures that to 10,000 highly active members. Combine that with a recent Pew study suggesting only 8% of American Internet users are tweeters and Twitter sounds like kind of a small community to be dropping major ad dollars into.

However, Twitter’s data is quite valuable for social monitoring purposes, hence why the company charges fees for data streams through Gnip. As more brands look for social monitoring services, requiring the purchase of more streams, could this become enough of a revenue driver to offset lackluster ad revenue?

Or should Twitter reconsider that rumored $10 billion acquisition offer from Google? Now those guys know how to soak up the ad revenue.