Google’s acquisition of Admeld is yet again under scrutiny after there was a repeat request made from the end of Antitrust authorities at the U.S. Justice Department. This is a new round of scrutiny which will test Google’s patience as it would mean that the search engine giant will have to further wait for complete clearance for this deal. In June, the deal between the respected parties was announced and the amount involved in this deal was around 400 million USD.
Google has its major ad income coming from the ads which are posted as search ads, appearing just next to the search results. However Google has looked to expand its territory to float deeper in the territory of much more display ads such as banner ads which always have big brand names. These display ads are of traditional nature. In this regard, Admeld has been offering “yield optimization” services which help publishers to obtain the best possible ads suitable for them.
Google’s display advertising VP, Neal Mohan blogged the request of DOJ as a routine. He said that discussions are on with the Department of Justice who have been following the deal processing because of the purchase price. He continued saying that theses requests do pop up for many acquisitions as they require few more details relating to the acquisition. They were however not surprised with the request as they know that the display advertising industry today is now just new but the degree of complexity is even very high. Mohan even took pains to show how this acquisition would not hurt competition as he pointed out to the recent developments in the concern diversification and how easy a task would it become for publishers if they want to make a switch over of services to other entities.
However it wasn’t a pleasing blog post when the response of Michael Barrett was noted who is the Chief Executive Officer of Admeld. Relating to the request he blogged that there was disappointment bec
ause of the re-request sent by the authorities, but they know that to analyze the competitiveness and the dynamism of any industry can be a time consuming job.
Looking at the history of the search engine giant, the focus was earlier only on search which later extended to search advertising. But it didn’t stop there. The march continued to get into a number of other areas which included social networking, browsers, word processing, photo sharing, display advertising, books, videos and most importantly e-mails where currently it has a major share. Google has not just been a giant when the talk is about search engine, but it has conquered even the e-mailing world and of late even Android has been pushing Apple’s iOS from the top slot.
But the increase in the share holding has even attracted a number of scrutinies and antitrust scrutiny for Google has as usual never stopped. In this particular field of display advertising, one can easily say that it is an interesting area. For this field, Google has already been tangled in 2007 when it had acquired DoubleClick which was a display ad firm and the acquisition amount was 3.1 billion USD. The tangle was big and 2007 was the era of Yahoo as they were the leaders of online display ads as they were in a stronger position as compared to anyone in the market for online display ads.