Home Google First? Selling Display Ads on Another Site

Google First? Selling Display Ads on Another Site

Yesterday, Google signed what is believed to be a first-of-its-kind deal for the search company to sell display advertising on a third-party site, reports Red Herring. That site is Glam Media, a women-targeted network of blogs and websites that ranks #2 behind iVillage in its niche, according to comScore. Last month Google spent $3.1 billion to acquire DoubleClick, a leader in the display advertising space, though the deal is not yet complete, and is facing scrutiny by the US Federal Trade Commission.

Glam CEO, Samir Arora, said that two “major search companies” had also courted Glam for the contract. He isn’t saying who, but many analysts guess that Yahoo! and Microsoft are the likely rebuffed suitors. Google is acknowledging that display advertising is making a comeback on the web. While search ads still dominate the advertising landscape, last year search ad revenue fell marginally while display ads were up.

Via its Adsense program Google has, of course, long placed graphical and video advertisements on third-party sites, but according to Red Herring this deal is unique and separate from the Adsense offering. Glam Media, which reaches over 21 million unique visitors world wide and is among comScore’s top 100 websites in the US, gives Google “a precedent to point to when they go beyond” this deal and start selling display ad services to other publishers, said Todd Greenwald, a senior analyst at Nollenberger Capital Partners in San Francisco to Red Herring.

Google signed another major advertising pact today, partnering with Salesforce.com confirming rumors first reported by the Wall Street Journal in May. Under the arrangement, Saleforce.com’s 32,300 customers customers will be able to purchase advertising via Google’s AdWords program from within the Salesforce application.

This announcement was a slight disappointment to Wall Street, where analysts hoped that Google and Saleforce.com would be integrating their online office software suites in order to take on Microsoft. Some thought that the deal would be precursor to a Google acquisition of Salesforce.com. Nonetheless, shares of Google shot up after today’s announcement, Saleforce.com, however, was trading down.

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