Google on Monday confirmed that it has purchased online ad firm AdMeld, which the search giant said will help publishers simplify the ad management process.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it is worth an estimated $400 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
"We've been investing in our publisher tools to try and improve this landscape and have made great progress, but we think we can do even better," Neal Mohan, vice president of display advertising at Google, wrote in a blog post.
"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," AdMeld CEO Michael Barrett said in a note on the AdMeld Web site.
Google described AdMeld as a "yield optimization provider." The Journal said the deal could help Google get ad space from top media companies like Thomson Reuters and News Corp., which allows AdMeld to handle the content they can't sell. With this ad space, Google could boost its DoubleClick Ad Exchange, the Journal said.
Google has been building its online advertising arsenal for some time. The search giant shelled out $3.1 billion for DoubleClick in 2007; the deal gained final approval in March 2008. In November 2009, Google announced plans to acquire mobile ad firm AdMob, and that deal was finalized in May 2010.
On Monday, Google announced it had sped up ad serving in DoubleClick for Advertisers. "We streamlined the process of issuing the DFA ad request and returning the ad to the browser by removing a step called the client-side redirect, and in the process shortened the time it takes to serve an ad," Google said. "This speed-up is especially noticeable on mobile devices, where the extra steps in the ad serving process can slow down the user experience by an average of 1.5 seconds."
The DoubleClick and AdMob deals faced scrutiny from regulatory agencies and Congress. The AdMeld deal would be Google's sixth-largest deal, the Journal said, so a similar probe from regulators here and abroad is expected.
As a result, "while the transaction undergoes regulatory review, our two companies will remain independent in the marketplace," according to AdMeld's Barrett.
In its blog post, Google made a point of mentioning AdMeld's competitors and the recent investments they've made, including PubMatic's acquisition of ReviNet last month, Rubicon Project's purchase of Fox Audience Network, and AOL's new Advertising.com Group, among others.
"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," Mohan concluded. "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."