After months of careful development and testing by ContextWeb, the ADSDAQ exchange’s online advertising self-service solution opened for business today to publishers large and small.

If you’re looking to monetize your site’s inventory, you can ‘go now’ to the ADSDAQ Selling Desk to sign up.

You’ll immediately be able to:

• Name the CPM price you want to earn.
• Get ad tags that will show advertising from top brand advertisers available now on the ADSDAQ exchange.
• Use the ADSDAQ platform as an ad server. For example, if we can’t pay your CPM, we’ll route the request to any ad network of your choosing such as Google AdSense, Valueclick, Right Media, Specific Media and Vibrant Media.
• View robust reporting.
• Receive payment in 30 days.

With today’s launch announced on the wires this morning, more mentions of the ADSDAQ exchange have appeared including Part II of PodTech’s interview with Jay Sears of ContextWeb at Search Engine Strategies. With Microsoft’s purchase of AdECN, Yahoo!’s acquisition of Right Media and Google’s purchase of Doubleclick, momentum in the online advertising exchange industry is clearly growing.

Click below to view Part II of the PodTech interview:

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-- John Ebbert



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As predicted in our July 24 post, the online advertising company consolidation continues. Last night, Yahoo!, on the heals of its $850 million payout for the Right Media advertising exchange, pocketed BlueLithium for $300 million.

Blue Lithium is one of the larger ad networks behind giants like Advertising.com and ValueClick and specializes in behavioral targeting for direct response advertisers across the remnant inventory of larger sites.

Word is the $300 million deal valued BlueLithium at 4-5 times revenue. That would put the company is a revenue range of $60-75 million, although alarm:clock reports 2006 revenue at $100 million. Back in April word was the company was on an IPO track.

It is refreshing to see Yahoo! take action to build network and exchange businesses, especially as portal ad buys continue to come under pricing and performance pressure from network and exchange businesses. CEO and Chairman Gurbaksh Chahal took the behavioral black box idea from Advertising.com, hired 120 people and created scale.

Themes we see in the Yahoo! – BlueLithium transaction and our take:

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-- Jay Sears



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[Author’s note: this post was completed 30 minutes before reading Microsoft will be paying $6 billion for aQuantive, as predicted below.]

The consolidation continues. WPP announced yesterday it will buy the digital media company 24/7 Real Media, a ten plus year old collection of digital assets including an ad server, search services (SEM and SEO) and a graphical ad network. Sir Martin Sorrell just upped his search spend with the Frienemy by $200 million…

Smart money would have had Steve Ballmer appending this asset to Microsoft’s MSN adCenter, but it looks like Sir Martin and WPP Digital CEO Mark Read, Group M CEO Irwin Gotlieb and their other execs (Gerard Broussard, Lance Maerov, Rob Norman, Lauren Reiss) stepped up to the plate and took the deep dive on this one.

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-- Jay Sears



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The April Fools Jokes are ‘flying’ for April 1, 2007 as the Google machine has cranked out a couple of current, web favorites including one regarding Dark Porcelain which is covered by Gizmodo:

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-- John Ebbert



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The biggest mistake of my career was not accepting a job offer with Microsoft back in 1995. I still have the offer letter to remind me that it can be really hard to judge opportunity when it knocks.

I imagine my friends and ex-colleagues at DoubleClick are going through a similar process with Microsoft right now. I was at DoubleClick when we went through the process of selling the company to Hellman and Friedman and it was not easy.

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-- John Pavley



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Like I told Shankar Gupta of MediaPost on Thursday, publishers today are mercenary—they want the best price. We want our publishers to demand the best from all of their ad networks and then come to us and give us a price that’s 10% or 20% higher, and tell us to jump over the bar.

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-- Jay Sears



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For many, a daily trip to one’s favorite blogs is part of life like a cup of coffee or… reading the morning newspaper. But, did you know you can use newsreaders to more efficiently read many blogs - including ContextWeb’s - in one place?

The newsreader, as Wikipedia points out, could mean one of three things: news client (old school Usenet reader), news presenter (Charles Gibson on ABC, for example) or aggregator.

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-- John Ebbert



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The AAAA (American Association of Advertising Agencies) conference kicks off today, the largest annual confab of Madison Avenue women and men. To set the AAAAs stage for some of the issues, Omnicom, WPP, Interpublic and Publicis and their agencies are dealing with, The Wall Street Journal is carrying a Q&A with Irwin Gotlieb, CEO of Group M, the unit of WPP Group that oversees various agencies including Beyond Interactive, Mindshare and Mediaedge:CIA.

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-- Jay Sears



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You would be hard pressed to find a Wall Street analyst that does not exude love and affection for Google. But, perhaps if you put a couple of them in Guantanamo-like conditions, they might say they would like to see Google have a path to more brand advertising dollars.

A key to success in unlocking brand advertising dollars in ContextWeb’s view:

Third Party Ad Serving

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-- Jay Sears



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Google announced yesterday that they are going to sell a “premier edition” of their hosted web applications. This is widely seen as part of Google’s plan to win over Microsoft Office users. My guess is that for a lot of small businesses Google Apps will do the trick. Microsoft has much to worry about these days.

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-- John Pavley



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