Just two years ago, Yahoo made another one of its expensive acquisitions by buying display ad network BlueLithium for $300 million. With a stated intent to marry rich analytical data with behavioral targeting, the ad network, founded just three years prior, was the fifth-largest in the US and the second-largest in the UK, with a reach of around 145 million monthly uniques.

Today—two short years later—it’s impossible to find it.

Google Blue Lithium or BlueLithium and the first page of results point to various news releases about the acquisition or stale company profile pages like on CrunchBase. There’s no link to a rebranding “BlueLithium is now Yahoo Web Advertising” or something similar that you’d expect. In fact, there’s no link to a yahoo.com URL whatsoever. (And just in case Google was gaming the SERP for its competitor, a quick look at Yahoo’s SERP shows similarly vacant results.)

Even worse: typing in bluelithium.com goes nowhere. As in a persistent time-out error. No 301 to Yahoo advertising.

This is beyond bizarre. Among publishers and advertisers, BlueLithium had developed a bit of a brand for itself; it was a name that was recognized. Branded searches (over 50,000 in August alone according to the Google keyword tool) and direct type-ins have undoubtedly continued. The ad network still exists (YieldBuild, in fact, supports it).

Doesn’t it strike anyone as strange that the network seems to have stonewalled any interest among publishers or advertisers that might be potential customers of Yahoo advertising? I mean, isn’t that Yahoo’s business?

The Fed Chief Ben Bernanke claims we’re emerging from a recession, real estate prices are stabilizing, and now even the moribund online ad sector is poised for a healthy rebound in the coming year. WPP’s GroupM is projecting 11% growth in online advertising in 2010 to hit $65 billion worldwide (across 36 countries), with online capturing 14.6% of tracked media.

United States in 2010:

• 7% growth to $24.4 billion
• 17% of overall ad spend (15.4% in 2009)
• search (including contextual) and video biggest drivers; display weak  (mirroring global trends: display will grow 5% next year compared to search’s 12%)
• strong weakness in traditional media (esp. newspapers) also a huge driver

The report gives a nod to behavioral targeting (“intentional marketing”) and the growing nexus between search advertising and socnets’ social graphs.

Mobile advertising gets notable attention: in 2010, it will account for 6% of total digital ad spend (or $3.3 billion), representing a 19% increase over 2009. In the U.S.:

• those accessing the news on their phones every day has doubled to 22 million in 2009
• those accessing socnets on their phones daily has quadrupled to 9 million this year

Today Google announced the launch of its DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which will open up both advertiser and publisher inventory and allow market dynamic-driven pricing and greater scalability with respect to audience reach for advertisers and access to a wider swathe of advertisers for publishers.

Or so goes the pitch. But this is Google, and if there’s one thing it knows and dominates, it’s online advertising.

Getting a sizeable exchange going can often present a chicken-and-egg problem, but Google’s reach among publishers and advertisers (DoubleClick for the head, AdSense/AdWords for the long tail) is already impressive, at 76% of the US and 73% of the global online audiences.

Exchanges, on the other hand, comprise about 10-15% of the display ad business (Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange is the largest). Google will shave off a relatively small fee through the exchange, but what it will gain is access to inventory sources if the exchange grows and dominates. If it can maintain higher efficiency than its competitors, Google will grow its share of a market that it will host and develop.

An PDF explaining the Ad Exchange is here. The DoubleClick blog also has more details.

I, along with millions of other Twitter users, received a friendly email from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone this morning sharing the popular service’s new terms of service (TOS). In the basic terms area, they add (italics mine):

The Services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the Content or information on the Services, queries made through the Services, or other information. The types and extent of advertising by Twitter on the Services are subject to change. In consideration for Twitter granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Twitter and its third party providers and partners may place such advertising on the Services or in connection with the display of Content or information from the Services whether submitted by you or others.

Before you scramble to your Twitter page to see what these ads look like, they add:

We’re leaving the door open for exploration in this area but we don’t have anything to announce.

Not only are ads going to be a distinctly probable possibility, but contextual and behavioral targeting are also being hinted at, too. It’s been a few years since Google raised hackles by announcing they’d serve up contextual advertising on Gmail (the furor has died down), but behavioral targeting moves beyond simple content matching on the page/tweet and might additionally look at patterns of searching and browsing behavior over time and potentially across sites and services. Since it’s been less than a year since Oprah gave Twitter a green light, it’s safe to say that Mr Stone and the rest of the management will move cautiously, especially since Congress is currently drafting a bill that would tackle behavioral targeting’s privacy issues.

You read that right!

We’re excited to announce that we have cut our ad optimization fee to zero. If you’re a current publisher, you will see the current 3% fee reduced to 0%, and new publishers will not be assessed a fee. We have been very pleased with the performance gains that our publishers have been enjoying, and want YieldBuild’s ad revenue maximization solution to reach as many new publishers as possible. Spread the word!

Not a YieldBuild publisher? Sign up today—YieldBuild is free to try and use!

Current YieldBuild publisher? The fee drop from 3% to 0% is effective September 3, 2009. Thank you for continuing to use YieldBuild!

Analytics firm ComScore has released a study that claims over 20% of all display ads in the US are being served onto social networks, the lion’s share on heavyweights MySpace and Facebook. Interestingly, those spending on socnets have names that are surprisingly familiar: AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and Microsoft.

What about the infamous advertiser skittishness with social networks?  Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeff Lindsay, when asked if advertisers are sensitive about what kind of content can be juxtaposed against their ads on social network sites, said:

“They are sensitive to some extent [to suggestive or offensive content], but nowhere near to the extent you might think.”

Seems to be the case for a certain type of advertiser. The top 10 advertisers fall into buckets that make sense if your target audience is younger people (i.e. those that won’t be put off by curse words, party shots and textese): cell phone companies (AT&T, Sprint and Verizon), online degree promoters (Apollo Group, Experian) and games and quizzes (Pangea, Zynga, GameVance). And Microsoft might be trying to raise its sexiness among younger people charmed by edgier Apple and Google.

As the general population becomes as comfortable with social network content as the Millennials, we might see a broader spectrum of advertisers penetrate the medium.

For online publishers that rely on advertising revenue as a significant source of their sites’ earnings, identifying the best-performing ad networks is no easy task. Network selection and evaluation has typically been a matter of trial and error and arduous testing, but is worth the effort if it results in significantly improved revenue. Automating this testing and format optimization of each ad spot on a site is precisely the benefit that YieldBuild provides its customers.  However, the breadth of ad network choices has been limited to those networks with the scale and technology to deliver high-performance, relevant ads for a wide range of content types.

For these reasons, YieldBuild was excited to launch its Premium Text Ad Program to offer Web publishers an ad source that consistently delivers outstanding contextual relevance and high publisher value. Across sites dedicated to topics as varied as automobiles, wine and product reviews, both large and small, publishers have seen impressive improvements to their overall online ad revenue without compromising user experience nor fully cannibalizing their revenue from their other ad networks like AdSense.

Most publishers using the Premium Text Ad Program see an immediate improvement to their revenue by simply adding an additional ad spot to their page, giving YieldBuild the opportunity to serve up an additional Premium Text Ad unit alongside AdSense. Three publishers, PrimaryGames, RateMyTeachers and HubPages, have all added the YieldBuild Premium Text Ad Program to their ad network mix, and all have seen strong revenue enhancement through the addition of a superior ad source as an adjunct to other ad networks they work with.

PrimaryGames

PrimaryGames.com, an educational gaming site popular with elementary-school children, came to YieldBuild with plenty of ad experience under their belt. Having tried a wide range of ad formats and networks, they knew what worked for their site’s traffic and what didn’t, but were open to working with YieldBuild to optimize their current ads and to try out the YieldBuild Premium Text Ad Program.

“It’s clear to us that no single ad network can fill all of our ad real estate, so we turned to YieldBuild to most effectively manage our inventory and identify those networks that perform best for each open ad spot,” says Susan Beasley, creator of PrimaryGames.com. “I’ve been pleased with the YieldBuild Premium Text Ad Program’s ability to deliver high-performance text and image ads which appeal to our younger viewer base. And, importantly, the ads are high quality, important since parents and teachers are frequent users of the site, as well.”

The Premium Text Ad Program now comprises slightly more than half of the text ad revenue PrimaryGames is generating through YieldBuild.

RateMyTeachers

RateMyTeachers.com is the premier online destination for students and parents to connect and share reviews and ratings of middle and high school teachers. Online since 2000, Ratemyteachers.com boasts over 11 million ratings of over 1 million teachers. The content-rich site is a perfect match for contextual ad networks like Google AdSense, and Aaron Altscher, Managing Director, was looking for an additional high-quality contextual ad source to complement them.

“YieldBuild’s Premium Text Ad Program has been a terrific complement to other text ad networks we’re running through YieldBuild on RateMyTeachers,” says Altscher. “The Program has allowed us to serve more highly-relevant ads alongside our content and boost our revenue significantly.”

With a fill rate higher than that of any other network they are optimizing through YieldBuild, the Premium Text Ad Program now comprises almost a fifth of the revenue generated for the site.

HubPages

HubPages is a wildly popular social content network that allows anyone to create rich-media articles on a topic they know and love, and earn ongoing royalties through ads served up on what they’ve published. The site attracts more than 16 million unique monthly visitors, primarily from search engines, and enjoys almost 70 million monthly page views.  85,000 authors have published more than 430,000 articles since the site’s launch in August 2006.

HubPages’s content richness and heavy traffic from search engines has made text-based contextual advertising the ideal monetization vehicle for the site. “In a short time the YieldBuild Premium Text Ad Program has grown to comprise almost a third of our site’s total revenue.  YieldBuild’s ability to automatically allocate the best paying ads for each ad spot has been critical to the implementation,” says Paul Deeds, HubPages’s general manager. “The Premium Text Ad Program serves up highly-relevant text and display ads that complement other ad networks’ ads across our wide range of topical content. We’re also impressed with the Program’s fill rate and revenue per click (CPC), even better than AdSense’s. The YieldBuild Premium Text Ad Program’s ability to deliver great contextual ads beyond the three ad-units of running AdSense alone has really helped us increase our revenue per page.”

Optimizing Premium Text Ads alongside AdSense has allowed HubPages to continue impressive month-over-month revenue gains despite a general softening of the online advertising market. YieldBuild has placed Premium Text Ads alongside the other ads on HubPages, increasing revenue 44% over the revenue generated by all other networks HubPages works with combined.

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Particularly as an adjunct to other networks like AdSense, with which publishers have trusted relationships, YieldBuild’s Premium Text Ad Program delivers a reliable additional revenue stream and highly relevant ads that complement page content. The Premium Text Ad Program draws from a variety of high-quality text ad sources.