From the recent tactical move of Etology, it seems that they’ve aimed to become the new industry leader in Internet advertising services. In October, Etology has hit major milestone and passed competitor AdBrite in daily ad-impressions, with over 1 billion Ads served daily (Jessica H., thanks for sent me the press release. Sorry I did not published this news at that time). And early this month, they also secured a multi-year mutually exclusive agreement and replaced AdBrite to power AVN Media Network’s new enhanced ad-platform. However, a more exciting news is that Etology has officially launched Ad-Butterfly in Japan with the strategic partnership of CGM Marketing and an alliance with Technorati Japan.

With a strong focus on bloggers in Japan, and blogs are the most favorite communication channel in Japan, Ad-Butterfly recognized that the value of targeted online advertising would be substantially increase if the bloggers can decide which Ads will run on their blogs. The plan of Ad-Butterfly is to provide bloggers a flexible “do it yourself,” and thus we saw Ad-Butterfly Ads has an extra built-in feature that allowed bloggers to add their own comments next to the Ads. Besides, bloggers that publish Ad-Butterfly Ads only need to add a snippet of Javascript code inside their blogs. Meanwhile, Ad-Butterfly has prepared a demo page that showed users how easy they can add the code to some blogging engines such as Livedoor, FC2, Blogger, Yaplog! and etc.

Currently, there are more than 2,000 bloggers signed-up for Ad-Butterfly, shortly after the three-month test run of this platform. However, Ad-Butterfly hopes to reach 10,000 bloggers by next spring and the market outlook of Ad-Butterfly looks bright as several major brands such as Toshiba, All Nippon Airways, BMW, and Nike have participated in the test runs, reported by ZDNet Asia.

Technorati, a blog search engine has expanded its latest round of financing from $7.6 million, to $10.52 million, and the latest amount was $11.52 million. New shareholder included DG Incubation, operator of Technorati Japan, alongside with the existing backers Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital.

Since the first inception of Technorati in 2002, they have enjoyed tremendous success and much of the success is due to the works of blog searching. However, blog search is nothing new in today’s market, they have some direct competitors in this field and one of them is Google. How they going to survive in the marketplace as one of their key developers also left for Google. Will the acquisition of Personal Bee or continue to use the aforesaid funding in improving the technological infrastructure would make them to play a prominent role in the blog search industry?