It’s happy times on the Right Media Exchange as employees and shareholders took in another $680 million from Yahoo! to be fully-acquired by the struggling web search/entertainment/whatever monolith.
With Google’s purchase of DoubleClick and its developing AdX Exchange, Yahoo! felt it needed to answer and it did. Will Microsoft now step up to the plate?
RightMedia currently provides the exchange platform to large advertisers and publishers and lets them battle it out in an exchange format which provides efficiency as opposed to the blackbox of AdSense or the more traditional, negotiate way of doing business that is familiar to ad networks.
In the Yahoo! press release regarding Yahoo’s initial investment last October, Greg Coleman, EVP of Global Media Sales, says, “Yahoo! believes an open and transparent ad exchange is an innovative new distribution channel for non-premium inventory and encourages competition in the market.”
To date, it is believed the largest client on RMX has been Yahoo! which has tons of inventory that is hard to monetize such as its gargantuan email inventory. If the Right Media ad exchange can even make a penny or two more per CPM than Yahoo can do by itself, that could be a significant opportunity for Yahoo!.
Founded in 2003, and having raised $45 million in Series B financing through venture capitalist partners led by Yahoo! and including Redpoint Ventures, current Right Media investors have struck gold and now Yahoo! has to justify RMX to its shareholders through careful integration of the ad exchange platform in its advertising strategy or it will continue to fall further behind the Google monolith.
