On its official blog last night, Google announced that its DoubleClick Ad Exchange is now open for business.
The service in a nutshell is a stock market for display ads, which lets companies bid for ad space across multiple sites in real-time. From a publisher’s perspective, the Ad Exchange provides real-time yield management to maximize returns for those managing multiple sales channels and ad networks.
DoubleClick says on its site that from a buyer’s perspective the technology not only offers real-time bidding, but access to more publishers and more ad space, a cleaner interface and a new API.
Neal Mohan, Google’s VP, Product Management says on the company blog that the goal with the new service is to “help grow the display advertising pie” by delivering better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure, simplify the buying/selling system and “open up the ecosystem” by democratizing access to display advertising like Google did with search. Of course, the Ad Exchange could be the result of Google’s minute presence in the display field, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that the company accounted for only 1.3% of display ad views in March of 2009, a number that’s inversely proportional to its 70% share of paid search spending.