ad networks Archives - Graeme Thickins on Tech

The advertising M&A game just keeps going and going…. MarketWatch reported earlier this evening that Yahoo will buy ad network BlueLithium for $300 million in cash. Yahooeatsbluelithium Blue Lithium, as I reported in my blog post How the Top Ad Networks Rank on August 18, is currently the fifth largest ad network. A few minutes ago, this Red Herring article went up, noting that Blue Lithium was founded in January 2004 and was backed by Walden Venture Capital and 3i. The article went on to state:

BlueLithium is also known for its behavioral targeting, which has become the must-have for online marketers. Behavioral targeting allows marketers to target users based on the sites they’ve visited, as well as demographic and geographic characteristics. Yahoo recently launched SmartAds, a nascent effort in this area.

YHOO was up 5.46% today, closing at 23.97. In after hours trading, it was up another 0.63% to 24.12 as of about 8:00 pm Eastern.

Do you ever wonder how the various online advertising networks compare in size to one another? How much traffic each gets? Well, comScore does a monthly report, and the July numbers just came out, as part of this August 17 press release. (See table 4.) They call this report their “Ad Focus Ranking,” which they define as “top entities supporting online advertising” (it’s U.S. only). Note that not all sites listed in the table are ad networks, just those marked with a double asterisk.

The top five ad networks are (1) Advertising.com, (2) ValueClick, (3) Google Ad Network (yes, it’s true — they’re not first in everything), (4) Tribal Fusion, and (5) Blue Lithium. The “reach” of these five sites — meaning the percentage of the entire Internet population that visited each site at least once in July — ranged from a high of 88% down to 66%. That represents some mighty big numbers, folks — 158 million and 119 million uniques, respectively. These sites are the current top-dogs in the ad network world.

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