CNN-owned Zite in April launched a program giving participating publishers their own dedicated sections within its newsreader app. The Daily Beast, Motley Fool and The Huffington Post were among the first outlets to sign on. Today, Zite announced the expansion of its publisher program with the addition of the Chicago Tribune, Cult of Mac, Entrepreneur, Hearst Magazines Digital Media, the International Business Times, the Los Angeles Times, and IDG titles Macworld, PC World and TechHive. Each specialized section feature’s a publication’s own branding as well as articles and content tailored to a user’s interests and tastes through Zite’s algorithm. …

Zite has extended its mobile news aggregator app to the Windows Phone platform. The app, which made its debut last year on the iPad, is now also available on the iPhone, Android devices, and the HP TouchPad. The company said the latest version of the Zite app is optimized for Windows Phone devices and takes advantage design principles built into the platform’s Metro interface. Given the tiny market share of Microsoft’s mobile OS, the move won’t necessarily catapult Zite’s downloads to new heights. Windows Phone’s share of the U.S. smartphone market as of May was 4%, according to comScore …

Pubicis Groupe reported a 15.5% gain in revenue in the second quarter to nearly $2 billion. Organic growth, which excludes acquistions and currency fluctuations, was much lower at 1.6%. The holding company attributed the low organic growth (considered a key performance indicator for the advertising industry) to continuing economic turmoil in Europe, a tough comparision to the same period a year ago when it had 7.6% organic growth, and the loss of the General Motors media assignment in the quarter. For the first half revenue was up 14.3% to nearly $3.8 billion with net income of $336 million, up 19%. …

Yahoo on Thursday announced enhancements to its Right Media Exchange to improve mobile targeting, reporting, RTB (real-time bidded) transactions, and campaign creation. The upgrades follow an initial set of mobile tools Right Media introduced in October. With the latest changes, Yahoo said mobile advertisers will be able to target by smartphone or tablet users, as well as by device manufacturer and specific makes and models of devices. Specifically, that means more than 300 devices made by Apple, HTC, Motorola and Samsung, and 75 tablet models from Apple, Amazon, Google and Samsung. Right Media is also expanding to targeting …

Google reported Thursday revenue from advertising and other rose 21% to $10.96 billion in the second quarter of 2012, compared with the year-ago quarter. The company's owned and operated sites pulled in $7.54 billion, or 69% of Google revenue, up 21% compared with Q2 2011. Partner sites generated $2.98 billion in revenue, or 27%, in the second quarter of 2012, representing a 20% increase from second quarter 2011 Google network revenues of $2.48 billion. Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of network members, rose 42%, compared with the second quarter …

Twitter introduced targeted Tweets Thursday, giving brands the ability to specific audiences on Twitter without first sending a Tweet to all followers. It lets brands with different launch dates for several countries send specific custom messages at different times per country. The feature works for mobile, too. Mobile app providers wanting to reach customers on one device can do so without sending the message to desktop users. Through Promoted Tweets, advertisers only pay when users engage with the ad. Tweets that generate the most engagement are likely to appear more often.

Publicis' Starcom MediaVest Group once again is the world's largest global media services network, but Omnicom's OMD unit is nipping at its heels, according to new estimates released this morning by Paris-based RECMA. Both those agency networks tied with a 10.7% share each of the global media agency network marketplace, as defined by RECMA.

Citing "uncertain" economic condiitons in the U.S. and Europe, WPP's GroupM unit has revised its global ad spending outlook for 2012 down 1.2 percentage points this morning. Worldwide ad spending is now forecast to expand 5.1% -- down from 6.3% in GroupM's previous forecast last year.

GroupM released Thursday a revised forecast for growth in ad spending. The company now estimates 5.1% growth to $506.3 billion for global media spend in 2012, down from 6.3% projected late last year. The 70-country forecast also predicted global ad spending in 2013 will rise 5.3% to $533.2 billion.

Losing access to some 20 plus million TV viewers is no picnic for Viacom networks. Now just about a week old, the DirecTV-Viacom stalemate -- where some 26 Viacom networks are off the satellite programming service due to a pricing carriage disagreement -- has revealed  some major viewership declines, according to Barclays Capital. Barclays says Viacom networks are averaging 27% viewership declines versus a year ago. Nickelodeon -- which has already been dinged by Nielsen this year with double-digit percentage declines in viewership -- is now off 45%; MTV is down 22% year to year; Spike is off 26%; Nick …