U.S. government green-lights Google’s $400M acquisition of Admeld

The U.S. Department of Justice today put its stamp of approval on Google’s acquisition of Admeld, an online ad startup.

The $400 million deal was under some scrutiny to determine whether or not it posed antitrust issues.

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However, as the DOJ’s Antitrust Division has found nothing objectionable in the deal, the acquisition will go through as planned.

“After a thorough review of the evidence, the division concluded that the transaction is not likely to substantially lessen competition in the sale of display advertising,” a representative noted in a statement issued by the division today.

The deal had been on hold at least since June 2011, when Google first officially confirmed it had entered into a contractual agreement to acquire Admeld.

At that time, Google Vice President of Display Advertising Neal Mohan stated, “The Admeld team is an example of the huge strides the industry is making — it has quickly developed a great service that is helping many major publishers manage their ad space more efficiently and profitably.”

Specifically, the startup’s service lets publishers to grab data about advertising performance from hundreds of ad networks, ad exchanges and other sources. This data allows the publishers to determine which ads are most and least effective — an area in which Google’s own services lag despite the search giant’s best efforts.

Admeld will work with Google’s display ad network and also with the Google-owned DoubleClick’s ad exchange. However, Google has stated that Admeld will also continue to work with ad exchanges owned and run by other companies, too, including rivals Yahoo and Google.

“For now, it’s business as usual,” Mohan wrote today on the company blog.

“Admeld’s products will operate separately to Google’s existing solutions (such as DoubleClick for Publishers and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange). But over time, there are opportunities to bring the best of both businesses together in a variety of ways; and to develop entirely new solutions, too.”

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Admeld has taken a total of $30 million in funding since it raised its first round in 2008.