14 DAY TRIAL // Advertising may not be the most exciting thing about Google but it's what pays the bills. And, despite many calling the company an "one trick pony" because of its failure to generate meaningful revenue through other means, it does look like, as one Google exec quipped last year, "it's a pretty good trick."
One of Google's latest ventures in the advertising, its Ad Exchange, part of DoubleClick, has been doing great in the first year since launch, at least according to Google's account.
"We unveiled the new Ad Exchange in late 2009 in North America and Europe, as an open, real-time auction marketplace for display ad space," Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management at Google explained.
"As of today, there are hundreds of premium publishers making ad space available, in addition to the many niche publishers that participate in Ad Exchange through the AdSense program. The number of transactions that occur every day has tripled," he announced.
Google has every reason to boast the performance of its Ad Exchange, for quite a lot of time, its display advertising business wasn't doing as great as its search and text ads. That seems to be changing though.
"When publishers make ad space available in the Ad Exchange, and the Exchange wins the auction, publishers generate, on average, 188% more revenue compared with indirect sales to ad networks and other third-party buyers," he claimed, based on research conducted and now published by Google.
Google continues to say that display ad sales are picking up at the company. In fact, it claims that its top 1,000 customers increased display ad spending by 75 percent in the last year alone.
Advertisers are also making the most of the bid system, which enables advertisers to pay what they are comfortable with or ensure that their ads are displayed in the places they want, as 56 percent of the ad spending is now done through real-time bidding.