Price: $400 million
Announced: June 2011
FTC Approval: Under review
If this purchase goes through, Google will have its end-to-end solution in online display advertising. In a note from shortly after the purchase announcement, Credit Suisse demonstrated that the purchase of AdMeld fit as the final piece in the puzzle: an ad would start with the advertiser and go through an ad agency to a demand side platform -- Google's June acquisition Invite Media. Then the ad would go to an ad exchange -- covered by Google's acquisition later in this list, DoubleClick. Next, on to its ad network and then to a supply side platform -- AdMeld. From AdMeld, the ad would reach users via a publisher such as yet another acquisition featured here, YouTube. For those keeping score, that kind of ad system would make use of four relatively recent purchases, three of which make Google's all-time top 10.
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