Pascal Lauener/ReutersYahoo Marissa Mayer has shut down the Right Media ad exchange the company bought in 2007.Yahoo has called time on the Right Media ad exchange it bought in 2007 for $680 million and has folded it into the wider Yahoo Ad Exchange proposition.
Right Media was focused on delivering high-volume ads to big audiences - primarily to performance ad networks looking to place cheap direct-response ads - across Yahoo sites and those that were not in the Yahoo family. In other words, the inventory isn't regarded as the most quality in the industry. It used to be the ad exchange for MySpace for example: Reams of low quality ads were one of the main reasons people migrated away from MySpace, which was once the world's most popular social network, to other platforms like Facebook.
The shuttering of Right Media would suggest that Yahoo wants to focus on more premium
In recent months Yahoo has acquired app analytics company Flurry, which it is reportedly merging with its Gemini self-service mobile ad marketplace, and Yahoo also recently acquired video ad tech company BrightRoll. All these recent moves suggest Yahoo's direction of travel when it comes to consolidating its advertising offer: Premium, mobile, and video.
AdExchanger first reported that Yahoo recently sent an email to clients telling them the platform would "imminently" be closed to third parties and non-Yahoo sites.
The "publishers" page on the Yahoo Advertising site confirms the news, reading "Right Media is now Yahoo Ad Exchange," but it provides no further information. Business Insider understands that ad buyers will now need to use Yahoo Ad Manager to buy third party inventory, while Yahoo Ad Exchange will be dedicated to Yahoo-owned and premium sites.
A Yahoo spokeswoman told Business Insider: "Yahoo is progressing the Yahoo Ad Exchange to more properly reflect its place in our business strategy. Yahoo Ad Exchange will continue to be home to display inventory for Yahoo sites and other hand-selected premium sites. We will continue to buy display inventory on behalf of our advertisers, using Yahoo programmatic buying tools connected to other marketplaces."
As AdExchanger notes, Right Media has "become more and more of a footnote, both at Yahoo and within the industry as a whole" as it failed to keep up technically with rival platforms like Google's DoubleClick Ad Exchange and AppNexus. That lack of investment from Yahoo was understood to have led to the departures of many of Right Media's original leadership team in recent years, including Mike Walrath, Bill Wise and Ramsey McGrory.
Yahoo is currently battling to turn around a long-term decline in its display advertising revenue. The Yahoo display ad network is still the second biggest ad network, behind Google, according to comScore. But its growth as waning as the chart below shows.
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