Google Will Keep Washington Regulators Busy With $400 Million AdMeld Deal

Google’s full employment program for anti-trust regulators continues: The search giant is in the final stages of a deal to purchase ad tech company AdMeld.

Like other recent Google purchases, this deal will automatically generate scrutiny from Washington before it can formally close. That’s both because of the size of the deal — around $400 million — and because the purchase deals with a sector that Google already dominates — display ad sales. AdMeld is one of a handful of big ad optimization platforms that work on behalf of publishers by trying to get the best prices for their inventory from a variety of ad networks. That kind of work is one of the few parts of the ad tech ecosystem where Google didn't already have a presence, so a deal for AdMeld or one of its peers always seemed inevitable.