AOL Overtakes Google For Most Video Ads Served Thanks To $405 Million Adap.tv Acquisition

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When AOL completed the acquisition of video advertising platform Adap.tv on Sep. 6 after buying it for $405 million the month before, it gained thousands of online publishers to compete with video advertising giant Google. That same month, comScore revealed today, AOL served 3.72 billion video ads to reach half of the U.S.'s online viewers, beating out Google's 3.24 billion ads.

This is the latest victory in Tim Armstrong's push to bring AOL back into a leadership position both financially and culturally, despite being founded on a stream of profit from dial-up.

Adap.tv CEO and founder Amir Ashkenazi operates the company as a standalone entity within AOL Networks. The acquisition accounted for 3.13 billion of AOL's video ads last months, a full 84 percent of the total. The remainder came from properties like the video streaming service AOL On and HuffPost TV, which averaged 6.7 ads served to each viewer.

Google's ownership of YouTube, which gets a billion views per month, has kept it the video ad leader for most of the year. BrightRoll overtook Google in Nov. and Dec. 2012, as well as May 2013, while Adap.tv rose through the ranks. Adap.tv's momentum brought it firmly ahead of BrightRoll this past Aug., so AOL's acquisition was a blatant move to gain the top spot.

How long this lasts will determine in large part the future of AOL's brand.