Teracent of success
Google is doing its Christmas shopping early this year, with the firm announcing Monday it had bought a San Mateo, CA based startup called Teracent, which creates algorithms for custom targeted display ads.
Google has long made money from search advertising and text ads, but it's no secret the Internet giant wants to cash in on the bigger display ad picture and muscle its way into a market currently dominated by the likes of Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft.
Indeed, it wasn't long ago Google splashed out $3.1 billion for major ad-network, DoubleClick and the firm also recently announced its $750 million acquisition of another advertising tech firm, AdMob.
Teracent pairs up nicely with both of Google's other recent ad based purchases, in so much as the firm optimises ads with algorithms to tailor them to specific users, making them much more relevant than ye old classic banner ad.
If all goes according to Google's plan, this should translate into better returns for advertisers and also let publishers make more money from their ad space, while not showing ads which are completely unrelated to their readership.
In a Google blog, vice president Neal Mohan and engineering director Joerg Heilig wrote, "Teracent's technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time - tweaking images, products, messages or colours."
The pair continued on to say "these elements can be optimised depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads."
