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Google’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick has suddenly turned the online advertisement market into a California gold rush scenario. It looks as if everyone either wants to buy a online ad exchange platform or wants to build one to get bought. Yahoo yesterday announced that it is buying the remaining 80% stakes of Right Media that it didn’t already owned for $680 million, valuing the entire company at $850 million, then we have reports that Microsoft wants to buy 24/7 RealMedia by offering to pay as much as $1 billion for the company.

Capitalizing on this hype ContextWeb has announced the launch of their own ad exchange platform called ADSDAQ. According to Anand Subramanian, CEO of ContextWeb, Inc:

Successful exchanges have always provided traders the ability to place a firm ‘Bid’ or ‘Ask’ price. The online marketplace is now ready for a true exchange. By including advertisers and publishers of all sizes, ADSDAQ creates a more scalable marketplace for premium advertising inventory across the entire internet.

ContextWeb has modeled its ad exchange truly on the NASDAQ principles allowing publishers to set an “asking price”, instead of just getting a cut from the bidding price of the winning advertisers. To even sound like NASDAQ they have named the ad exchange as ADSDAQ, great branding move I must say.

ContextWeb claims to be the 27th largest ad-supported property according to comScore Media Metrix (March 2007) serving more than 350 advertisers and 1,000 publishers. It reaches more 54 million unique visitors every month.

ContextWeb was founded in 2000 and has raised $27 million to-date. The company is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (”DFJ”) Gotham Ventures, DFJ New England, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Updata Partners and has 60 employees. Although they have declined to comment on whether the company is profitable or not, but have mentioned that they are doubling their revenues year on year for the past two years now.