Google Inc. has struck a deal to buy Admeld, a service that helps websites make more money from online advertising.
The agreement announced Monday positions Google to add another potentially valuable weapon to its advertising arsenal. Google already sells the most advertising on the Internet. The company’s total ad revenue is expected to surpass $30 billion this year — greater than the entire U.S. newspaper industry.
For that reason, the proposed acquisition of Admeld may face more regulatory scrutiny than most deals of its size do.
Financial terms of the Admeld agreement weren’t disclosed, an indication that Google isn’t paying a high enough price for the proposed acquisition to be considered a major financial event.
Founded three years ago, privately held Admeld employs about 100 workers at its New York headquarters and other offices in San Francisco, London, Berlin and Toronto.
Admeld’s service is focused on marketing campaigns that promote brands and typically feature imagery. The format is known as display advertising, an area where Google Inc. has been gaining market share since its $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick Inc. in 2008.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission spent a year examining the DoubleClick deal, still the largest acquisition in Google’s 13-year history.
Google has been building its display advertising business to supplement its dominance of Internet search and the text-based ads that run alongside search results as well as other Web content.
The diversification has been working out so well that the research firm IDC said Google surpassed the Internet’s long-time display advertising leader, Yahoo Inc., during the first three months of this year. IDC estimated Google held 14.7 percent of the U.S. online display ad market in the first quarter, followed by Yahoo at 12.3 percent and Facebook at 8.8 percent.
“Together with Admeld, we hope to make display advertising simpler, more efficient and more valuable,” Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display advertising, wrote in a Monday post on Google’s blog.
Admeld works with websites to help them figure out how to make the most money from the amount of space they have available to show display ads. Its list of customers includes News Corp., IAC/InterActiveCorp., Thomson Reuters Corp. and Pandora Media Inc., which is preparing to go public this week.
Google didn’t specify a timetable for closing the Admeld acquisition. The company’s executives have repeatedly said they expect regulators around the world to take more time poring over how Google’s acquisitions might affect competition on the Internet.
The intensified scrutiny hasn’t curbed Google’s appetite for acquisitions. Since the end of 2009, Google has spent more than $2.6 billion buying more than 60 companies.
Apple and Google Face UK Investigation Into Mobile Browser Dominance
Apple and Google aren't giving consumers a genuine choice of mobile web browsers, a British watchdog said Friday in a report that recommends they face an investigation under new U.K. digital rules taking effect next year.
The Competition and Markets Authority took aim at Apple, saying the iPhone maker's tactics hold back innovation by stopping rivals from giving users new features like faster webpage loading. Apple does this by restricting progressive web apps, which don't need to be downloaded from an app store and aren't subject to app store commissions, the report said.
"This technology is not able to fully take off on iOS devices," the watchdog said in a provisional report on its investigation into mobile browsers that it opened after an initial study concluded that Apple and Google effectively have a chokehold on "mobile ecosystems."
The CMA's report also found that Apple and Google manipulate the choices given to mobile phone users to make their own browsers "the clearest or easiest option."
And it said that the a revenue-sharing deal between the two U.S. Big Tech companies "significantly reduces their financial incentives" to compete in mobile browsers on Apple's iOS operating system for iPhones.
Both companies said they will "engage constructively" with the CMA.
Apple said it disagreed with the findings and said it was concerned that the recommendations would undermine user privacy and security.
Google said the openness of its Android mobile operating system "has helped to expand choice, reduce prices and democratize access to smartphones and apps" and that it's "committed to open platforms that empower consumers."
It's the latest move by regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to crack down on the... Read More