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Google has acquired Admeld, which helps publishers optimize their business relationships with advertisers, for $400 million, according to TechCrunch, and independently verified by a number of other publications, but neither company so far.
According to the Admeld website: "We provide expertise and technology to help you level the playing field with buyers, sell smarter, and get back to focusing on what you do best-cultivating sustainable relationships with advertisers."
To some extent Google already offers an advertising optimization service for publishers via its DoubleClick service, which was itself acquired for $3.1 billion back in 2007. Admeld's functionality would presumably augment that aspect of DoubleClick, helping to maintain Google's dominant position in online advertising.
It will be interesting to see how tolerant regulators are of Google doing just that, however. The DoubleClick acquisition faced considerable regulatory scrutiny, while the purchase of mobile display advertising giant AdMob took six months to be approved, and even that was only after Apple snapped up rival company Quattro, thus assuring competition for Google in this area.
Google is an advertising company, and everything else it does, such as Android and Chrome, exists to expand its total available market or defend what it already has. As All Things D observed, Google has bought other companies designed to make its ad business more efficient in recent years. But via an infographic, which we've reproduced below, illustrated just how diverse the advertising ecosystem still is.
In a recent blog post Neal Mohan, VP of display advertising at Google, said "we're investing significantly to help improve display advertising for publishers," and predicted that display advertising will become a $200 billion business. Google obviously wants as much of that $200 billion as possible, but it's the job of regulators to ensure it doesn't get too much.
