We have heard it for two+ years–Google’s struggle to push themselves beyond the world of text ads and into the world of display ads–see my February post “It’s the Third Party Ad Serving Stupid“. They will be a lot closer after their $3.1 billion dollar acquisition of DoubleClick closes later this year.

ContextWeb’s highest comScore numbers ever came out this week–54 million monthly uniques and 3.2 billion impressions for March. What is the reason for this scale? Answer: in early 2005 ContextWeb was the first to offer contextually targeted graphical ads (third party served) to the advertising agency market. With our ContextCategory, ContextProfile and ContextBlock products for advertising agencies, we know a lot about the combination of contextual and graphical.

There are so many moving parts and implications on this transaction:

• Psychological Smackdown of Microsoft and Yahoo!. Another one stolen from Microsoft and Yahoo!–incredible. After losing the DoubleClick purchase, YouTube purchase, MySpace distribution, AOL distribution–MSFT and YHOO have to be doing some serious soul searching. Get in the game already guys! If Google buys DoubleClick because they both occupy 111 Eighth Avenue in New York City, maybe Microsoft will buy aQuantive in Seattle.
• Google Wants to be in the Display Advertising Business.
  • 290 Billion Impressions Each Month. DoubleClick sits on a motherload of impressions flying around from the biggest web publishers and biggest web advertisers (really ad agencies). Google is swimming upstream from their LongTail world of text ads and search to the Fat tail of the advertising world. (Warning: different world, culture shift ahead…)
  • Third Party Ad Serving (read my post) .
  • Closer to their Frienemies with DFA (DART ad serving for Advertisers)
  • Closer to Fat Tail publishers
• Free Adserving. Will ad serving become free? Wait, it already is: OpenAds.
• DoubleClick’s Exchange. On DoubleClick’s exchange for Fat Tail publisher remnant inventory, this question on yesterday’s Google investor conference call from Brian Pitz at Bank Of America: “And, just the thoughts on the [DoubleClick] ad exchange? Answer: Susan Wojcicki [VP Google Product Management]: Yeah. So, on the ad exchange, that’s a new thing that DoubleClick has announced recently, and I think it’s a little early for us to comment on it. It is an auction-based system and that is something that Google has been a pioneer in. And, I think it will take us — you know, we will want to work with them and try to understand better what they are doing. But, as you know, we are a pioneer in auction systems and we are very supportive of providing the most efficient way for advertisers to get inventory.

All this is a validation for what we have been doing here at ContextWeb. And it will keep the game interesting, for sure. And Yahoo! and Microsoft, don’t foget, it is like the lottery–You Have To Be in It to Win It!

More Updates: Robert Scoble, Don Dodge.Google Watch, Washington Post, Things That, CNET News.com, A VC, Microsoft, Jeremy’s Blog, Scobleizer, Search Engine Roundtable, Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts, Microsoft News Tracker, WebProNews, Silicon Valley Watcher, GigaOm, Inc. Magazine and Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim

Tags: DoubleClick, Google, Microsoft, display, advertising, ad, serving, exchange, contextweb

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