Glass Box Media

There is no arguing about the fact Google dominates the online text-ad market, however one area they are yet to conquer is the display ad market.

Google has frittered with the idea of display advertising for a couple of years through it’s AdWords platform, with image ads. However, yesterday came the announcement that they were ‘launching’ the Google Ad Exchange. We use ‘launching’ very loosely, as it is basically a re-brand of the existing DoubleClick ad exchange which it acquired in 2008 for $3.1bn (£1.9bn). The idea behind the rebrand is for Google to use it’s technology and knowledge to grow this area of the business.

Google’s Vice President for product management, Neal Mohan, said “Better technology can help make display advertising work better for all involved. We’re focused on growing the display advertising pie for everyone. The DoubleClick Ad Exchange is a major part of that goal.”

The display ad network will be accessible to current DoubleClick ad exchange advertisers, as well as AdWords advertisers and AdSense publisers; allowing access to the new real-time bidding system and an API. This will be a real boost to AdWords advertisers, as it will grow the potential reach of their inventory from the standard content network, to a wide range of hign profile publishers in the ad exchange.

Currently, Yahoo runs the largest ad exchange network RightMedia, which it bought for $690m (£417m) in 2007.

Display advertising online was worth around £4.7bn in 2008, which is roughly a third of all internet ad spend for the year. The launch of the Google Ad Exchange should open the market up a little, and provide smaller advertisers a greater opportunity to expose their brand online in a controlled way.