Yahoo Finally Clicks With RightMedia Acquisition

Yahoo has announced the acquisition of the remaining 80% shares of RightMedia that they did not already owned. The announcement was officially made by Terry Semel, Chairman and CEO of Yahoo on the Yahoo blog and was soon confirmed by Michael Walrath, CEO of Right Media on the official Right Media Blog.

RightMedia is an online ad exchange platform similar to DoubleClick which was acquired by Google recently. Currently more than 20,000 buyers and sellers are trading over four billion impressions a day on the RightMedia ad exchange platform. The company was founded in 2003 and raised $7.5 million in series A round from Redpoint Ventures. The company later raised $45 million in Oct 2006 in Series B from Yahoo with Redpoint Ventures also participating in the round.

This is the first major acquisition by Yahoo in a long time. The company for the past two years has continued to pickpocket small media and social startups like Flickr, Upcoming.org, del.icio.us and MyBlogLog among others, but messed up with the facebook acquisition talks when the asking price topped $1 billion. Many analysts thought that the company is now incapable of landing big deals after the facebook fumble. The acquisition will definitely strengthen Yahoo’s position in the online advertisement market against Google which encroached on Yahoo’s territory in a big way by acquiring DoubleClick.

Following Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, Microsoft and other companies requested federal regulators to investigate the deal on anti-trust grounds, claiming that the DoubleClick acquisition will make Google an online advertisement monopoly. Yahoo’s current move has now provided Google with a solid example to claim that the digital advertisement market place is competitive enough.

The news set the blogosphere buzzing. You can check out what fellow bloggers are saying about it here.

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