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This is a big move, very smart for Google. Also, anyone else notice that the hackernews community seems to either a) not understand or b) not care as much abou

This is a big move, very smart for Google. Also, anyone else notice that the hackernews community seems to either a) not understand or b) not care as much about the ad tech world?

coderdude 15y ago
I think it's an interesting sector. The reason HN probably doesn't care is because a lot of us fall under the category of "tech hipsters." Many tech hipsters hate advertising and by extension anything that enables publishers to show them ads (e.g., "I use noscript so I don't have to see any of those ads." and "I use adblock every1 uses adblock stopid"). Targeted advertising tech seems to be the big winner when it comes to being acquired. There have been several extremely high payouts in recent years for companies similar to this one. I'm surprised there aren't more people working to that end. (Maybe there are and you just don't hear about the swathes of companies that don't get acquired.)
- karamdeep 15y ago
  there are quite a few companies focused on the space, as detailed here: http://www.slideshare.net/tkawaja/luma-display-ad-tech-landscape-2010-1231 http://www.slideshare.net/tkawaja/luma-display-ad-tech-lands...
  - ashbrahma 15y ago
    There is an updated version that just released this week on WSJ. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/06/06/online-ads-where-1240-companies-fit-in/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/06/06/online-ads-where-1240...
- stevenj 15y ago
  >Many tech hipsters hate advertising If that's true, I'd recommend they (and anyone who has a distaste for advertising) watch Art & Copy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_%26_Copy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_%26_Copy.
  - jodrellblank 15y ago
    Why would you recommend it? That link doesn't give me any reason to think it's worth watching, or that I should want to change my dislike of advertising. I think I have very good reasons for disliking advertising, things like one or more of the following: it's taking up my limited time, attention and cognitive abilities to tell me about things I don't want or need or can't use. It's uglifying my surroundings. It's interrupting and distracting. It's telling me about things I do want but can't afford, or use, or don't have room or time for. It's telling me about things I didn't want, but now do, which is annoying. It's telling me about things I do want, and already know about. It's deliberately misleading. I feel bad that an advertising company is paying money to a service provider because I saw an advert for something I will never buy. There is a hypothetical "targetted advert" which shows me just what I want, right when I want it. I think this is a mirage they chase to avoid facing up to how ridiculous an idea it really is.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- hooande 15y ago
  Ad companies make a lot of money. A mediocre ad network will make more money than a mediocre social site or mobile app. A $400MM acquisition for an ad network isn't even on the high end. I feel that ads represent a big problem to be solved. They suck so much that people intentionally block them. It's going to take some serious hacking of the system to fix that, it's a huge challenge.
skimbrel 15y ago
There are definitely some exceptions -- it's what I do for a living. And yeah, this is big news in the space. Google is clearly making a move into online display advertising, having all but conquered direct-response. It'll be interesting to see how they do. Display advertising has a vastly different set of challenges associated with it -- brands care first and foremost about the safety of the pages they run on, which means Google will need to be a lot more selective about the publishers they partner with for display, and brand lift through display advertising is a lot harder to measure than direct-response conversions. (Obligatory plug if you're also one of the exceptions (or interested in being one): SAY Media, my employer, is hiring engineers! Check us out at http://www.saymedia.com/. http://www.saymedia.com/.)
- pedoh 15y ago
  Chalk me up as another one in the ad industry for a living. For me, the excitement of working in the ad industry comes not from the end product that we produce, but from the technical challenges we face. We're trying to serve ads in under 100 milliseconds. Not just a few. Hundreds of thousands, every second. The infrastructure and intelligent architecture to handle data at that speed and scale (not just for serving the ads, but doing reporting on them) is incredible. Downtime is not acceptable, so on the DevOps side of things we're monitoring everything carefully and often redundantly, and collecting hundreds of thousands of metrics every minute to give us many views into our system. Deployments happen multiple times daily, and our Engineers have sweet tools to roll out their code to all environments (okay, I'm a little biased, since I wrote a lot of those tools). If you want experience working on large scale projects, I'd say the ad industry is a good place to be. I imagine the finance divisions that have large infrastructures really close to the trading floor are also pretty amazing, although I have no personal experience. AppNexus is hiring, too. Hit me up with any questions, or go to http://appnexus.com/careers/ http://appnexus.com/careers/
- whiletruefork 15y ago
  Google overtook Yahoo as the largest display network last month, so it's a bit more then making a move at this point :) http://mashable.com/2011/05/26/google-yahoo-display/ http://mashable.com/2011/05/26/google-yahoo-display/
pagefruit 15y ago
Would anyone mind explaining what the difference between all these ad companies is? In my mind, ad companies are kind of like finance companies, in that they all have the same goals (beating the stock market/displaying optimal ads), and differ mostly in their exact algorithms and technology. (Compare this to "standard" tech companies, where it goes the other way around: their products are very different (e.g., Twitter is not Facebook), though their technologies don't really differ that much from each other.) Is this accurate?
- jbooth 15y ago
  There's actually a whole ecosystem in between advertisers, publishers and consumers, with a bunch of different layers. Here's an illustrative graphic: http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2010/9/28/the-display-ad-tech-landscape.html http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2010/9/28/the-display-a...
- pedoh 15y ago
  Some of these companies are direct competitors in that how they differ is in their algorithms or the sliver of the market they're trying to "be the best" for. But then you get into the difference between networks, exchanges, DSPs, et cetera, and the differences and relationships between them get complicated. Check this graph out: http://chrisohara.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/ecosystem_011011.png http://chrisohara.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/ecosystem_0110...
- jbl 15y ago
  There are lots of ways to organize companies in the ad tech space, but I like to think of them based on what masters they serve. (FWIW, I've been working in ad tech for the last three years) One of the big divides is serving advertisers vs. serving publishers. The Kawaja/Luma Partners slide that is oft cited shows how various companies fit into this divide. Advertiser (or buy-side) tech generally tries to optimize on ROI ... driving revenue per ad dollar spent. On the publisher side, tech tends to be about driving higher impression prices... finding the right buyers for the impressions you serve. Another divide in my mind is tech that is designed for brand advertising vs. tech designed mainly for direct response. Brand advertising is typically what you see in national TV ad spots or in the full page adverts in magazines. The SuperBowl ad spots are emblematic of this. On the other hand, you have adverts that are more about offering a particular product or service with a concrete offer (Two for one, 10% off for referring a friend, etc.).
andreyf 15y ago
I think this is the "plumbing", if you will, of the internet. For a $400m acquisition, AdMeld doesn't even have a wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdMeld http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdMeld
nopal 15y ago
Will Google buy any ad-related company that gains traction?
- ktsmith 15y ago
  That's pretty unlikely. If you look at their acquisitions they are buying up companies that are sitting in different points of the advertising ecosystem. This purchase gives them yield optimization technology.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

This is a big move, very smart for Google. Also, anyone else notice that the hackernews community seems to either a) not understand or b) not care as much about the ad tech world?

coderdude 15y ago

I think it's an interesting sector. The reason HN probably doesn't care is because a lot of us fall under the category of "tech hipsters." Many tech hipsters hate advertising and by extension anything that enables publishers to show them ads (e.g., "I use noscript so I don't have to see any of those ads." and "I use adblock every1 uses adblock stopid"). Targeted advertising tech seems to be the big winner when it comes to being acquired. There have been several extremely high payouts in recent years for companies similar to this one. I'm surprised there aren't more people working to that end. (Maybe there are and you just don't hear about the swathes of companies that don't get acquired.)

karamdeep 15y ago
there are quite a few companies focused on the space, as detailed here: http://www.slideshare.net/tkawaja/luma-display-ad-tech-landscape-2010-1231 http://www.slideshare.net/tkawaja/luma-display-ad-tech-lands...
- ashbrahma 15y ago
  There is an updated version that just released this week on WSJ. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/06/06/online-ads-where-1240-companies-fit-in/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/06/06/online-ads-where-1240...
stevenj 15y ago
>Many tech hipsters hate advertising If that's true, I'd recommend they (and anyone who has a distaste for advertising) watch Art & Copy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_%26_Copy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_%26_Copy.
- jodrellblank 15y ago
  Why would you recommend it? That link doesn't give me any reason to think it's worth watching, or that I should want to change my dislike of advertising. I think I have very good reasons for disliking advertising, things like one or more of the following: it's taking up my limited time, attention and cognitive abilities to tell me about things I don't want or need or can't use. It's uglifying my surroundings. It's interrupting and distracting. It's telling me about things I do want but can't afford, or use, or don't have room or time for. It's telling me about things I didn't want, but now do, which is annoying. It's telling me about things I do want, and already know about. It's deliberately misleading. I feel bad that an advertising company is paying money to a service provider because I saw an advert for something I will never buy. There is a hypothetical "targetted advert" which shows me just what I want, right when I want it. I think this is a mirage they chase to avoid facing up to how ridiculous an idea it really is.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
hooande 15y ago
Ad companies make a lot of money. A mediocre ad network will make more money than a mediocre social site or mobile app. A $400MM acquisition for an ad network isn't even on the high end. I feel that ads represent a big problem to be solved. They suck so much that people intentionally block them. It's going to take some serious hacking of the system to fix that, it's a huge challenge.

skimbrel 15y ago

There are definitely some exceptions -- it's what I do for a living. And yeah, this is big news in the space. Google is clearly making a move into online display advertising, having all but conquered direct-response. It'll be interesting to see how they do. Display advertising has a vastly different set of challenges associated with it -- brands care first and foremost about the safety of the pages they run on, which means Google will need to be a lot more selective about the publishers they partner with for display, and brand lift through display advertising is a lot harder to measure than direct-response conversions. (Obligatory plug if you're also one of the exceptions (or interested in being one): SAY Media, my employer, is hiring engineers! Check us out at http://www.saymedia.com/. http://www.saymedia.com/.)

pedoh 15y ago
Chalk me up as another one in the ad industry for a living. For me, the excitement of working in the ad industry comes not from the end product that we produce, but from the technical challenges we face. We're trying to serve ads in under 100 milliseconds. Not just a few. Hundreds of thousands, every second. The infrastructure and intelligent architecture to handle data at that speed and scale (not just for serving the ads, but doing reporting on them) is incredible. Downtime is not acceptable, so on the DevOps side of things we're monitoring everything carefully and often redundantly, and collecting hundreds of thousands of metrics every minute to give us many views into our system. Deployments happen multiple times daily, and our Engineers have sweet tools to roll out their code to all environments (okay, I'm a little biased, since I wrote a lot of those tools). If you want experience working on large scale projects, I'd say the ad industry is a good place to be. I imagine the finance divisions that have large infrastructures really close to the trading floor are also pretty amazing, although I have no personal experience. AppNexus is hiring, too. Hit me up with any questions, or go to http://appnexus.com/careers/ http://appnexus.com/careers/
whiletruefork 15y ago
Google overtook Yahoo as the largest display network last month, so it's a bit more then making a move at this point :) http://mashable.com/2011/05/26/google-yahoo-display/ http://mashable.com/2011/05/26/google-yahoo-display/

pagefruit 15y ago

Would anyone mind explaining what the difference between all these ad companies is? In my mind, ad companies are kind of like finance companies, in that they all have the same goals (beating the stock market/displaying optimal ads), and differ mostly in their exact algorithms and technology. (Compare this to "standard" tech companies, where it goes the other way around: their products are very different (e.g., Twitter is not Facebook), though their technologies don't really differ that much from each other.) Is this accurate?

jbooth 15y ago
There's actually a whole ecosystem in between advertisers, publishers and consumers, with a bunch of different layers. Here's an illustrative graphic: http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2010/9/28/the-display-ad-tech-landscape.html http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2010/9/28/the-display-a...
pedoh 15y ago
Some of these companies are direct competitors in that how they differ is in their algorithms or the sliver of the market they're trying to "be the best" for. But then you get into the difference between networks, exchanges, DSPs, et cetera, and the differences and relationships between them get complicated. Check this graph out: http://chrisohara.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/ecosystem_011011.png http://chrisohara.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/ecosystem_0110...
jbl 15y ago
There are lots of ways to organize companies in the ad tech space, but I like to think of them based on what masters they serve. (FWIW, I've been working in ad tech for the last three years) One of the big divides is serving advertisers vs. serving publishers. The Kawaja/Luma Partners slide that is oft cited shows how various companies fit into this divide. Advertiser (or buy-side) tech generally tries to optimize on ROI ... driving revenue per ad dollar spent. On the publisher side, tech tends to be about driving higher impression prices... finding the right buyers for the impressions you serve. Another divide in my mind is tech that is designed for brand advertising vs. tech designed mainly for direct response. Brand advertising is typically what you see in national TV ad spots or in the full page adverts in magazines. The SuperBowl ad spots are emblematic of this. On the other hand, you have adverts that are more about offering a particular product or service with a concrete offer (Two for one, 10% off for referring a friend, etc.).

andreyf 15y ago

I think this is the "plumbing", if you will, of the internet. For a $400m acquisition, AdMeld doesn't even have a wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdMeld http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdMeld

nopal 15y ago

Will Google buy any ad-related company that gains traction?

ktsmith 15y ago
That's pretty unlikely. If you look at their acquisitions they are buying up companies that are sitting in different points of the advertising ecosystem. This purchase gives them yield optimization technology.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]