Google set to buy AdMeld for $400M
Google is reportedly set to buy AdMeld, which sells display advertising for large Websites that Google currently doesn’t have access to in its DoubleClick Ad Exchange program.
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is in the process of purchasing AdMeld, which sells display advertising for large Websites owned by Thomson Reuters and Discovery Communications, and News Corp.’s Fox News and New York Post sites.
Google declined to confirm the buy, which TechCrunch first reported and claimed was worth $400 million.
Google has more or less locked up the market for search ads, where it has 90 percent-plus of text-based ads paired with search results. However, the company’s plot of display ads—graphical ads with glimmer and sparkle that sometimes irk users—is much less.
IDC said Google’s U.S. display ad revenue share grew to 14.7 percent in the first quarter of 2011 from 13.3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010, passing Yahoo for the first time.
Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display advertising, said engagement rates across all display ads will increase by 50 percent as “ads become less cluttered, more relevant, more engaging and more attractive.”
Adding AdMeld would help Google grab ad inventory from leading online content publishers for its DoubleClick Ad Exchange marketplace, providing quite a weapon for Google in its battle against Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and other rivals.
