Google, which has dominated search advertising, is hoping to take over the display advertisement space by launching new DoubleClick Ad Exchange to create an open, real-time marketplace for large online publishers and ad networks and agencies to buy and sell display advertising space. In an announcement made on the company’s blog, Google says that display advertising, which are ad formats that include videos, images and interactive ads are becoming “vital in boosting awareness and sales” on the web.
Traditionally, publishers and advertisers using Google’s AdSense and AdWords products would have to manually plan their display ad campaigns. Now, publishers can tap into Google’s ecosystem for ads where prices are set in a real-time auction and advertisers can access a large pool of inventory within one platform.
Google says the benefits for publishers include the real-time allocation, letting them allocate ad space to the advertiser that pays the most at a given time; access to more advertisers; greater control over advertisers and ad formats, a sleeker UI, and payment system managed completely by Google.
And of course advertisers can access a platform that provides more publishers and ad space, a greater control over where a display ad appears, and access to a new API that lets advertisers and networks integrate their own functionality and systems when working with the Ad Exchange.
Google bought display ad provider DoubleClick in 2007 for $3.1 billion in cash, after apparently winning a bidding war with Microsoft. The announcement of this new marketplace is a direct move against Yahoo, which has dominated the display ad marketplace for some time.
Would be cool to see something openx-style, where publishers/advertisers work on a common platform. Adsense UI for publishers is sorely needing a refresh
+1
Agreed.. a display feature more like Analytics would be cool (flashy UI)!
I have never seen author Leena Rao replying in comments.. ??
Not only the UI. There is lots of things that need to be improved on adsense. Starting with more transparency on commercial conditions and following with more granularity of control to publishers.
Things like being able to chose not only whether you want to show text and images, but also differentiate keyword-based and site-oriented, allow to opt out of behavioural targeting and to establish different settings for all these by country.
I guess that’s the end for Seattle’s AdReady.
Didn’t DoubleClick launch this two years ago and lose its VP a couple weeks ago? Was that all just a beta product?
Good move by Google but we have to wait and see how it shapes… I think only big publishers will benefit from it and will not create any difference to small publishers…
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Looking forward to seeing the ROI for advertisers with the real time bidding and the additional yield to the publishers. This has been a long time coming and I wonder if the $3 billion investment was worth it. So now there is Right Media, AdBrite, ADSDAQ and now DC. Still not that many players in the exchange world, I’d imagine there will be more to come
Full disclosure: I work for a company that does predictive optimization for real time bidding, so to a degree I am a corporate shill. HOWEVER:
This is much bigger than is being recognized right now, and the effects of this software release are going to ripple through the online world for a long time.
By far the most important feature of AdExchange 2.0 is the addition of real time bidding to inventory across the AdSense and GCN network. Why? Because real time bidding, for the first time, enables advertisers to buy ads against who you are instead of where you are on the Web, by checking with a range of data sources against what’s known about an IP address before deciding whether to buy an ad that will be shown to you.
Forget predefined audience segments. Instead, an algorithm will identify what data points make up the profile of someone likely to click through and buy something, figure out what they’re worth, and then bid for that specific combination. The efficiency of this approach is virtually unprecedented in advertising.
A big part of the reason that response rates to online ads are terrible is because so much of the content is irrelevant. That’s about to change in a big way. If you’re a fisherman, for instance, theres a good chance that you’re about to start seeing fishing gear advertised to you on major publishing outlets.
There are privacy concerns to debate, and that will begin to play out over the coming months. I can say that at [x+1] we explicitly work to keep names disassociated from the data. The algorithms are much more interested in figuring out what you might be interested in buying. It’s really about advertising to you more effectively, not looking over your shoulder.
Some of the effects this will have on the online ad industry are virtually guaranteed. For one, it diminishes the importance of ad networks, because buying based on content in order to reach demographics is less vital when you can follow those demographics across the Web for the first time.
Furthermore, because this kind of advertising has been shown to be significantly more effective – and reliable – at given levels of spend than many kinds of traditional advertising, it will accelerate the movement of advertising budgets online. It might actually push the overall amount of advertising spend up, as advertisers become confident that spending more means they can reliably and efficiently sell more.
The effects on publishers remain to be seen. As it becomes clear where high value groups are spending more of their time, ad dollars will shift dynamically, through the exchange, without people and prepackaged audience segmentation standing in the way. The competition among publishers to garner the highest value ad placements, not just the most clickthroughs, may fundamentally change what kind of content is produced at a range of destinations across the Web in ways that are hard to forecast.
Anyone want to take a stab at how this could affect online publishing?
How do publishers signup? Is it automatic through AdSense?
This will be an excellent service and provide a lot of worth to both advertisers and publishers. We have had lots of experience with both Doubleclick’s and Google’s advertising platforms and expect their Exchange to be just as positive.
I hope this acquisition will bring some fruitful results because double click technology would be widely acceptable by advertiser & publishers and Google is knowing users interest across many websites.
This move eventually Google will remove competition from Yahoo