Online job search shop RiseSmart (focused on people earning more than $100,000 a year and their potential employers) recently closed a $3 million Series A funding round, led by Norwest Venture Partners.

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Oak Investments appears to be bullish on The Huffington Post’s revenue model, despite the sluggish economy.

“Much of the news media business needs to be reassembled online around an ad-supported model and the timetable for this has been accelerated, not slowed, by this economic down cycle,” Harman said.

The funding will be used to grow the site and acquire other sites. The Huffington Post will also pad out its ad sales team and roll out new content projects, including video and local versions of HuffPost.

“This commitment from Oak Investment Partners will allow us to accelerate our growth, with more verticals, more video, more citizen journalism initiatives, more cities for our local editions, and a fund for investigative journalism,” said Arianna Huffington.

The new proceeds reportedly put HuffPost’s valuation at just about $100 million.

“Mercedes-Benz has always been highly attuned to the voice of its loyal customer base, which has helped propel our brand to where it is today,” said Stephen Cannon, vice president of marketing, Mercedes-Benz USA. “When our customers join the brand, they tend to stay. Our Generation Benz community is a natural extension of our desire to broaden the Mercedes-Benz family, and establish a dialogue with future buyers to guide us with the design of our vehicles and direction of our brand.”
Mercedes-Benz will elicit feedback on its cars, brand positioning and socio-cultural trends and will preview upcoming ads and marketing campaigns, in what it said is a first in the luxury auto space.

Passenger works with companies such as ABC, Chrysler, Coca-Cola and Fox to build and manage private online communities to make more informed business decisions, innovate more rapidly, and design better products and services.

While the travel industry has been slammed by the economic downturn, and visits to travel sites are down about 3%, HomeAway may have tapped into a relatively unexploited niche in the market. Traffic to its site has been up about 58% year-over-year.

HomeAway plans to spend the new funds on acquisitions. The Austin, Texas-based shop has already acquired 10 companies.

The Burst Auto Intenders Network will be powered by adConductor. Ads will be shown to auto shoppers when they visit any of the 4,600 sites in the Burst Network.

“Reaching consumers at the tipping point of a major purchase decision is critical for marketers,” said David Cooperstein, CMO of Burst Media. “Our Auto Intenders Network gives auto marketers the opportunity to reach the consumer who has displayed in active interest in buying a car, even when they are engaged in other, lifestyle-oriented content. In this challenging economic environment, being able to reach the active shopper is powerful opportunity marketers cannot pass up.”

The Burst Auto Intenders Network aims to provide Web publishers with high quality brand advertising at higher CPMs. The Burst Auto Intenders Network joins other Burst vertical networks as a tool for advertisers to reach out to consumers with specific interests and invite them to engage with their brands.

Other Burst vertical audience networks include Entertainment, Moms, Early Adopters, Family Builders, Baby Boomers, Family Travelers, Green, Trendsetters, Gamers, Thought Leaders and Wellness. Burst also offers publisher-led networks including the CDKitchen Cooking Network, the RealGM Sports Network, the Daily Jolt College Network and the Kiwibox Teen Network.

Just as healthy online ad economies hide weaknesses in the network ranks, the downturn will reward networks that stand up to scrutiny. Numbering into the 300s – even more, by some estimates – ad networks vie for a piece of a shrinking piece.

If you’re a media buyer how do you shore up your buy? With buys needing more justification and accountability than ever, what are the bellwethers for a healthy ad network for my needs? Author and consultant Robert Moskowitz recently provided a variety of tips on selecting the right ad network for your campaign.

As an ad network though, you need to take stock in what you ultimately control: your ad network. That may sound pedestrian but tough times should drive you to focus on a few core rules. Does your network add something truly unique to the equation? And what are you doing to ensure you are standing when the dust settles?

When it comes to key initiatives within the ad network industry, there are three key legs of the proverbial stool that will make or break your ad network in these uncertain times:

Proprietary Technology
What is your special Intellectual Property sauce? Ad networks that simply rely on brute force, media arbitrage, and outsourced manual optimization are on a road to nowhere.

A network’s role as value-added intermediary begs demonstration of said value by 1) creating relevant efficiencies, 2) providing something an advertiser wasn’t getting previously and 3) developing ways to get things done at less cost – and unless networks leverage unique technology solutions to these challenges, they’re undifferentiated and their success has an expiration date.

Scale and Unique Reach
With so many types of networks – behavioral, geographic, vertical, and so on – HOW we reach an audience is just as important as WHO we reach. While enormous scale is still a selling point for some ad networks, it is quickly becoming less of a differentiator. Instead, unique reach to specific verticals and target markets is becoming increasingly attractive to advertisers. Ad networks that are able to target specific valuable audiences, in a transparent way, clearly set themselves apart from the masses.

Sales Team
I’m just going to say it right now: Sales people (often) suck. Network reps are notorious for their lack of experience and penchant for being ill-prepared and unable to succinctly describe the exact value they bring to the table (See Points 1 & 2). Maybe a few bad apples have spoiled the bunch, but network sales folks and their leadership have scorched a large swath of online ad dollars via agencies and brands, and those buyers are still feeling the burn.

How do you avoid this? Start slow and low (CPM), communicate proactively, prove the value and over-deliver on the proposition. Build spend and relationships over time. You’ll be doing us all a favor.

This is a time to return to the basics. Sanjaya Patel of Google (ex-DoubleClick executive) mirrored my assessment during a recent OMMA Global panel. Patel added that while most ad nets are making money now and will continue to do so in the short term, long-term viability is still in question.

Make no mistake, there will be significant consolidation, shakeout and movement in this industry over the coming months. In the meantime, as a media buyer, know what to look for, and as an ad network, know what you look like. In either case, this will serve you well as the industry as a whole finds its feet.

“Lat49’s mapvertising gives us yet another way to provide value through the exclusive nature of our publisher relationships,” says Cree Lawson, TAN’s Founder & CEO. “We see this as a new performance product for our advertisers and a compelling revenue opportunity for our publishers that goes beyond the banner.”

“We are very pleased by our partnership with Travel Ad Network,” says Keith Ippel, President and COO of Lat49. “It is a great step toward extending our reach deeper into the travel market. Maps are integral to travel, and the Travel Ad Network already is the leader in the online travel industry. We look forward to working with the team at TAN to bring the value of local, targeted, on-map advertising to the travel market.”

Travel Ad Network reaches 25 million worldwide unique users through sites such as Lonely Planet, Rand McNally, Maps.com and 200 other travel websites.

The network will be comprised of a handful of teen-focused sites anchored by Kiwibox. Publishers will be able to share ideas, content, tools, partnerships and marketing opportunities across both the Web and mobile.

“This partnership is unique because we’re looking at it from both the publisher’s and the teen user’s perspective,” Mike Howard, Vice President of Sales of Kiwibox.com, told ADOTAS. “We have a huge variety of exclusive content, much of it generated by the teen users themselves. And Burst Media has a stellar sales team that will help us boost our position in the teen market.”

The company said that its new network gives brand advertisers an easy solution for reaching the valuable yet elusive teen audience in a single online media buy that provides comprehensive campaign management and consolidated reporting, while integrating a variety of interactive and engaging campaign elements.

“Kiwibox’s approach to building a network is spot-on and I am happy Burst is an important part of their efforts” said Jarvis Coffin, CEO and co-Founder of Burst Media. “Teens are a tough target to reach – they’re not only the ultimate media multi-taskers, but they’re also widely dispersed on the Internet. The Kiwibox Teen Network is bringing together great teen sites and firmly anchoring them under the Kiwibox brand. It is a quality approach that will give advertisers a targeted and highly efficient way to reach teens online with the creative advertising options necessary to connect with this important consumer group.”

So what’s next for Kiwibox?

“We just celebrated our nine-year anniversary as a company,” Howard noted. “We are confident that we’ve proved that we can effectively monetize this business model. Over the next two to three years we’d like to replicate what we’ve done with teens and apply it to an older audience.”

And in spite of all of the general atmosphere of economic gloom that’s descended in recent weeks, Howard thinks Kiwibox / Burst Media partnership is timed impeccably: “Burst Media has been a strong partner of ours since 2000 – this was a no-brainer when we started looking around for an ad network to partner with. It gives us access to larger media companies we wouldn’t have access to otherwise. And despite all of the negative news about the economy, the online ad industry is extremely agile. Right now, advertisers are looking at more than just reach – they’re looking at engagement. Which is exactly what our new network will provide.”

Intent.com features include:

INTENT VOICES — featuring blogs from well-known luminaries such as Deepak Chopra, Larry Dossey, Olivia Newton John, Ed Begley Jr., Debbie Ford, Fran Drescher, Don Miguel Ruiz, Joan Borysenko, life coach Laura Day, Russell Simmons, Project (RED) founder Tamsin Smith and more.

DAILY FEATURED ARTICLES AND BLOG POSTS — The best wellness articles and content from across the web carefully aggregated and curated from leading online sources such as Good Magazine, BeThree, Treehugger, VitalJuiceDaily, Beliefnet, DailyOm, Causecast, Enlightenext (formerly What is Enlightenment? magazine) and major newspapers and publications.

DYNAMIC SOCIAL NETWORK — The Intent community enables members to find other users with similar interests in the wellness space, and find support in fulfilling their aspirations. Members can post personal blogs, find new like-minded friends, share information, and get updates from their friends about their online activity on Intent.

“As the daughter of Deepak Chopra, I’ve been fortunate to interact with inspiring leaders, thinkers, celebrities, and individuals who are devoted to a healthy, humane society and planet,” Chopra said. “My hope is that Intent — by bringing these voices together for a larger community — can be a socially conscious business that brings together a global community to inspire, educate and connect.”

Intent.com will also syndicate their content and campaigns to other like-minded sites. The first campaign, entitled Breast Cancer: Healing the Whole Woman, has been syndicated to Beliefnet, Yahoo Shine, Care2.org, Huffington Post, and MarthaStewart.com.

The launch advertiser is Swarovski. Glam Luxury aims to enable advertisers to target “affluent tastemakers and audiences at the heart of the Web’s long-tail,” the company reports.

More than 35 Web sites and online publishers have joined Glam Luxury—including new Glam publishers BlackBook.com, Luxique, Momist, Senora Cartera and Travels in Taste, along with existing publishers Refinery 29 and Apartment Therapy—as part of the larger Glam Publisher Network of 640+ sites.

“Glam Luxury is more relevant for luxury marketers than ever before,” said Joe Lagani, Vice President of Brand Sales for Glam and former publisher of Conde Nast’s House & Garden. “The words, images and thoughts that surround a luxury brand must reflect the current times with a speed and adaptability the high-end marketer requires. Glam Media provides marketers with the right audience, environment and reach, and enough flexibility to change with marketplace dynamics.”

Glam Media’s vertical content network now features eight separate channels representing each vertical, including: Style (Fashion, Beauty, Shopping); Living (Food & Wine, Home & Design, Travel & Leisure); Entertainment; Wellness; Health; Family, Black Life and Luxury. The company’s market-leading publisher network of 640+ sites includes: Apartment Therapy; BagSnob; EatingWell; Manolo the Shoeblogger; Nylon, SheFinds, Stylebakery, Stylefeeder, Zafu and many others.