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It's Official - Google Buys Admeld

Its Official - Google Buys AdmeldAccording to The Official Google blog, Google has purchased AdMeld for a still-to-be disclosed sum.

From the Google blog post and VP Neal Mohan:

"By combining Admeld’s services, expertise and technology with Google’s offerings, we’re investing in what we hope will be an improved era of flexible ad management tools for major publishers. Together with Admeld, we hope to make display advertising simpler, more efficient and more valuable, provide improved support and services, and enable publishers to make more informed decisions across all their ad space. These are all things our publisher partners have been asking us to further invest in. Of course, Admeld will continue to support other ad networks, demand side platforms, exchanges and ad servers, to yield the best possible results for publishers."

Read Mohan's interview with AdExchanger.com on the deal here.

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, who reported the deal was done as of last Thursday, said at the time that the price tag was $400 million.

There's also a post from Admeld CEO Michael Barrett on the Admeld blog here which reads in part:

"This is an exciting moment for Admeld, not only because it speaks to the quality of our platform, team, and the results we produce for our clients, but also because it underscores Google’s dedication to helping publishers get the most out of the display ad landscape.

What’s driving this relationship is a shared belief that managing display advertising is still far too complicated for publishers, and together Admeld and Google can help address some of the underlying inefficiencies. Though we have no specific integration plans yet, we imagine our combined offerings can help publishers make more informed, efficient, and profitable decisions across all tiers of their inventory."

Reaction from around the Web (will update throughout the day):

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PubMatic CEO Goel Discusses Revinet Acquisition And Scale

PubMatic Acquires RevinetYesterday, PubMatic announced that it had acquired publisher yield optimizer Revinet, According to the release, PubMatic will a new office in Boston, 15 new employees, and a set of publishers in the news vertical "including The Christian Science Monitor, A.H. Belo, Boston Herald, The Sporting News, and more." Read the release.

PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel discussed the acquisition and its impact.

What was the cost of the transaction to PubMatic?

This was an all cash deal and will be accretive from the start.  Our business model is heavily aligned with the success of publishers on our platform, so as we ramp up publisher revenue from our advanced technology, both publishers and PubMatic will see gains. Right now the demand for quality RTB inventory outpaces the quality supply, so the ReviNet publishers will experience significant revenue growth in the near term.

Would you say this transaction is all about scale? If so, why is scale important?

This deal is not justabout scale; it is about achieving the right kind of scale. There are several sources of low quality inventory at scale, but we’re focused strictly on premium inventory and premium audience, and the vast majority of ReviNet’s publishers are in the News vertical. In terms of valuable inventory, News always ranks amongst the most sought after. When buyers want access to News-related inventory and audience at scale, they can come to us, which means that our publishers get access to high quality buyers first.

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OpenX Wants To Provide Total Revenue Stack With New Ad Server For Publishers Says CTO Linden

OpenXToday, OpenX formally announced OpenX Enterprise, a new publisher ad server which it says optimizes "all ad revenue channels in one place. This includes inventory sold through a direct sales force as well as inventory sold indirectly through the rapidly increasing number of demand sources such as ad networks and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs)." Read the release.

John Linden, CTO for OpenX, discussed the announcement and the new ad server's implications.

AdExchanger.com: Describe the target publisher for the new ad server.

JL: OpenX Enterprise is designed for large and mid-sized publishers who need a premium ad server that allows them to manage all of their revenue channels in one place, that want to benefit from direct selling tools which have been completed redesigned, and that need to manage first and third party data in a comprehensive way. OpenX Enterprise can most certainly be used very effectively by publishers with relatively simple needs, but we think its innovations really shine when publishers have more sophisticated and innovative ad businesses and more complex ad technology needs.

We’re already starting to see this trend play out, with leading large publishers around the world - such as Groupon, Excite Japan and Orange-France Telecom - adopting the platform.

What's in it for marketers?

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IDG TechNetwork CEO Longo On New Private Exchange Strategy With AdMeld

TechMediaExchangeIn an article in Ad Age, vertical ad network IDG TechNetwork announced that it has entered into an agreement with sell-side platform AdMeld, who will provide technology and services for a private display ad exchange called TechMediaExchange.com. AdMeld CEO Michael Barrett tells Ad Age's Edmund Lee, "More and more publishers are looking to find ways to reclaim their inventory, which has long been sold in a black-box exchange where buyers get lowest possible rates." Read more in Ad Age.

Peter Longo, CEO, IDG TechNetwork, discussed his company's private exchange strategy.

AdExchanger.com: Why is it important that buyers are curated for your private exchange?

PL: Our goal is to build a premium experience on Tech Media Exchange (TMX) in the same way that we have delivered on the IDG TechNetwork. As a private ad exchange, we are creating an environment where the best technology advertisers will appear on the best websites creating the best experience for the end user. To accomplish this, we have chosen to partner with AdMeld to power TMX. In addition, while the Exchange will be a real-time environment, our largest and best technology marketers and agencies are going to want to secure longer-term inventory futures to meet their campaign objectives, which is in the best interests of both our publisher sites and the TMX.

Can you share who the partners will be and why?

We are in beta through next month, and will announce partners by the end of February. However, the likely advertisers are not hard not to imagine: DSPs and ATDs representing technology clients.

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New CEO Nibley Says Yieldex Next Step Is To Develop Sales And Marketing Culture

YieldexAndrew Nibley was recently appointed CEO of Yieldex. From last week's release, "Prior to joining Yieldex, Nibley was Chairman and CEO of WPP's advertising and digital marketing agency Marsteller. He has also served as CEO at several digital media companies owned by media giants Vivendi, Bertelsmann and Reuters, including co-founding Reuters New Media." Read more. The Company added that it had more than quadrupled its revenue and doubled its customer base in 2010.

Nibley discussed his new role and a few of his plans for Yieldex.

AdExchanger.com: Why did you decide to take the CEO role? Given your PR experience, might we expect more from Yieldex in that area?

AN: I decided to come take the job at Yieldex because I had met Tom Shields and immediately took a liking to him and was impressed by his thinking and his strategy for the digital advertising industry. As I got to know everyone else at Yieldex, I became totally convinced that this was a company in the right market at the right time. Yieldex has been deliberately quiet for the past few years as it has built a solid technical platform, a well-respected product and a blue-chip list of clients. Now is the right time, I think, for the company to emerge a little more into the spotlight. And yes, with my background in journalism, advertising, public relations and marketing, I think it is safe to assume that Yieldex will be taking a more public posture going forward.

How will Tom Shields role and responsibilities within Yieldex evolve with your appointment?

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John Carnahan Discusses New CTO Role At The Rubicon Project And Product Roadmap

Rubicon ProjectJohn Carnahan recently discussed his transition from Fox Audience Network (FAN) to becoming CTO of Rubicon Project as well as his new company's product roadmap.

AdExchanger.com: Where are you from a tech perspective in transitioning FAN tech to the Rubicon Project? Future product development aside, when will it be completed?

In many ways the core tech is already integrated by the existing relationship. For example pre-acquisition MyAds campaigns have been serving with publishers that also leverage the Rubicon Project’s REVV platform for some time. Of course FAN is not just MyAds. Over the past 4 years FAN has been a leader and a pioneer in building publisher tools focused on audience targeting and ad serving for a wide variety of publishers. We will be bringing the combined set of Rubicon and FAN features to bear with a series of initiatives. The first of these initiatives is to further bridge the gap between MyAds advertisers and publishers using the REVV platform, so publishers who weren’t previously leveraging MyAds and want the additional performance demand can gain that access. Longer term our initiatives will focus on building tools for publishers that provide more control and visibility into the demand sources that are available through the Rubicon Project’s REVV Marketplace, and products that give them a lot of flexibility in how they sell inventory through those demand sources.

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AdExchanger.com Predictions for 2011: Publisher Technology

AdExchanger.com 2011 Predictions: Publisher TechnologyAdExchanger.com reached out to the publisher technology community for their predictions about the digital advertising ecosystem in 2011.

Click a name below to begin, or scroll:

Frank Addante, CEO, Rubicon Project

  • Publishers will realize that sales channels are a critical part of their revenue growth (ad networks, exchanges & DSPs) because they don't have the sales coverage to reach every advertiser or the technology to support every campaign. RTB will be the key driver of this realization.
  • Defragmentation of inventory due to marketplaces centralizing inventory will cause RTB to see explosive growth.
  • Automation is going to put more strain on publishers, they are going to get killed with channel conflict and ad quality.
  • Further developments in regulation discussions around data will set the rules of the game, becoming more of an enabler for legit companies (similar to CAN-SPAM act in email - email industry thrived once the rules were defined) than a threat to the industry.

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Metamarkets Enabling Big Media To Effectively Analyze, Price And Predict Inventory Value Says CEO Soloff

MetamarketsDavid Soloff is CEO of Metamarkets, a publisher analytics company.

AdExchanger.com: What have you been up to in the 5 months since last we spoke?

DS: Four things: expanding the core engineering team, building the product, deploying with early customers, iterating tightly.

We’re building a very large scale data processing and predictive analytics infrastructure to capture billions of daily transactions on behalf of publishers. We process 2 billion daily events on our infrastructure. We add a terabyte daily to our 250-terabyte clearinghouse of media transaction data. We’re well on the way to aggregating a petabyte of media markets data. Thanks to the collapse in the costs for compute and storage, Metamarkets is capturing primary economic signal to publisher benefit.

What do you mean “primary economic signal to publisher benefit”?

This is data that reflects an economic transaction. It’s a principals trade – one agent in the market has something to sell, another has something they wish to buy. Each party has a set of attributes that perfectly describe the item they want to buy or sell. If we capture billions of these combinations, across geographies, buying agents, selling agents, we begin to describe an entire economic world, reflective of sentiment and activity. If we can process and store enough of this data, we can eliminate noise and locate signal. This data as recently as 9 months ago was too diffuse to capture and too expensive to store -- essentially, global media companies have been forced to behave like a national retailer who would sell billions of items, but due to an infrastructure gap, would expunge nightly all cash register and point-of-sale data, to pretty predictable effect.

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Rubicon Project Press Conference On Monday

Announcement on Monday - likely regarding the acquisition of FAN assets... from the press release:

the Rubicon Project Hosts Press Conference With CEO & Founder, Frank Addante

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--the Rubicon Project will host a press conference to discuss company strategy and future growth plans.

Who: Frank Addante, CEO and Founder of the Rubicon Project

When: Monday, November 1, 2010 at 11:00am Eastern / 8:00am Pacific. A brief question and answer session will follow the press conference.

Where: Live presentation via WebEx. To register, send name and email address to press@rubiconproject.com. Participants can also follow the event on twitter and submit questions via hashtag #REVV.

Visiblity On Revenue And Third-Party Cookies In Data Firewall Product Says PubMatic CEO Goel

PubMaticPubMatic announced its new Data Firewall product which the company says enables "publishers [to] get visibility into 3rd party companies that are tracking the publisher’s audience via pixels or cookies and causing data leakage." Furthermore, the product provides the ability to view revenue by third-party provider (such as an ad network) according to the release. Read it.

PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel discussed the new product and its implications.

AdExchanger.com: Wait, in your last piece, I thought it was not about "data leakage," - but now it appears that it is?

RG: Data leakage, audience data theft, too much pixel dropping behind the publisher’s back - call it what you will, but it is a huge problem. My point in the piece you’re referring to was that "leakage" isn’t the best word to describe what is happening because data isn’t leaked from the publisher, it’s being taken from the publisher.

However, we recognize that "data leakage" is what the industry at large seems to be calling it, and we’d rather fix the problem than worry about re-naming it. I wouldn’t be opposed to someone else renaming it though.

Maybe we should conduct a poll at our Ad Revenue 2010 conference on Oct 7; Doug Weaver (Upstream Group) is hosting what I believe is the first ever panel completely dedicated to the publisher data leakage subject. Or maybe people will leave comments here with suggestions.

Regardless of whether or not "data leakage" remains the industry’s term of choice or not, I’ll still think it sounds nasty.

How do you recommend publishers evaluate 3rd party relationships? Is it strictly CPMs?

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