All of that has been great news for Luma Partners’ Terry Kawaja, a banker who has made a specialty of navigating and explaining that landscape.

A few years ago, Kawaja put together a chart that tried to map out all of the different players, and that graphic became an instant hit for him: Regular people can’t make any sense out of this stuff, but for people in the industry, Kawaja’s “Lumascape” is a key reference text. Since then, he has put together eight more, each drilling down into a specific ad tech subsector.

Here’s the newest one, focused on what Kawaja is calling “marketing technology,” which he says includes everyone from Oracle to WordPress to dozens of companies likely known only to their employees.

You can click on the graphic below to enlarge it, or head here for Kawaja’s explanation of the graphic, and a link to a larger version.

Does that make sense to you? Don’t worry if you said “no” — implicit in Kawaja’s pitch is that this stuff is so dizzying that only a trained professional can understand it. But that seems to be working out quite nicely for him.

The New York Times is looking for a new ad sales head, following a corporate re-org that went into effect yesterday.

Denise Warren, who used to head up both ad sales and the Times website, has a new role heading up “digital products and services” for the company. In her place, the Times has temporarily installed ad executives Todd Haskell and Andy Wright.

In a memo explaining the change last month, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and new CEO Mark Thompson said the company would look for a permanent replacement “immediately, considering both the talent we have inside The Times and the external market.” Warren had been in charge of ad sales at the publisher since 2005.

Whoever gets the job will have their work cut out for them. Like the rest of the newspaper industry, the Times has seen print ads decline for years, but recently its digital ad revenue has been contracting as well.

In February, the Times said advertising had dropped by 8 percent in the last three months of 2012. The paper also warned that the ad tech boom had begun to compound the pricing problem Web publishers were already seeing from a “glut of available ad inventory,” citing “a shift toward ad exchanges, real-time bidding and other programmatic buying channels.”

In other words: “Premium publishers” like the Times used to be able to charge advertisers more than the rest of the Web. But the gap between the haves and have-nots is shrinking, aided by technology that is supposed to let advertisers cherry-pick the eyeballs they want, wherever they are.

We should see the newest evidence of that later this month, when the Times reports its results from the first quarter of 2013.

Previous investors including Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners and Menlo Ventures are back as well; DataXu has now raised $65 million.

DataXu started out in life as one of many “demand side platforms” that helped marketers place their ads in “real time” ad exchanges and took a cut of the media they bought.

Now CEO Mike Baker says the bulk of his revenues comes from software he licenses, which is supposed to let ad buyers navigate that world on their own.

DataXu’s giant round is one of many we’ve seen in the last year. Last month, for instance, ad platform AppNexus pulled down $75 million; in June, publisher platform PubMatic rounded up $45 million.

All of these companies play in different parts of the complicated ad tech landscape, but all of these big dollar bets are headed in the same direction: Their investors think they’re going to end up bulking up — via growth and M&A — and going public.

A lot of these guys have now raised so much that they don’t really have any other option. At one point investors were assuming that all sorts of acquirers would step in and snap these guys up, but aside from Google and Adobe, most would-be acquirers have sat on their checkbooks. But some optimists/bankers are hoping to entice Yahoo and/or Facebook to come to the table…

CEO Hardeep Bindra is telling partners that the company, which has 26 employees, will close by the end of the month, and is selling off its assets. In an interview, Bindra says he had been trying to sell off the entire company, but sales talks “unfortunately fell through a couple weeks ago.”

AdBrite raised a reported $40 million since 2004, much of it from Sequoia Capital. It was best known for many years as the creation of Philip Kaplan, who had achieved notoriety during the end of the Web 1.0 boom for his FuckedCompany site. For years the company described itself as the “largest independent ad exchange, rivaling Google and Yahoo.”

But that kind of designation doesn’t mean a whole lot right now, and the ad exchange market is dominated by a handful of large players (you can also add newcomer AppNexus to the mix, as well as Facebook’s newly hatched FBX). Bindra, who joined AdBrite last April after working on Yahoo’s ad exchange, says his marching orders at the time were to set the company up for a sale.

I don’t have terms of the deal, but my hunch is that it will involve some equity from New York-based MediaMath, which has raised at least $30 million. It is buying Akamai’s Advertising Decisions Solutions unit, which the company created when it got into the ad business in 2008 by buying Acerno for $95 million.

Akamai makes the bulk of its money as a content delivery network, helping move bits around the Internet. At the time of the Acerno deal, the thought was that the infrastructure it had built up would help make it a big player in Web ads.

But the company never made an aggressive push into the new business, and it’s unclear if it will remain in ads following the MediaMath deal. I’ve asked both companies for comment but haven’t heard back.

Update: AdAge has more details — it confirms the equity component, and says 70 Akamai employees will join MediaMath.

Here’s one of them: The Trade Desk, a three-year-old ad buying platform that is staffing up as its sales boom. The company, which expanded from 17 to 40 people in the last year, has hired Rob Perdue as its first chief operating officer.

Perdue’s last job was at digital ad shop EyeWonder, where he managed 320 people; he also helped broker the company’s sale to MediaMind in 2011.

Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green says his company has seen revenue jump 1200 percent in the last year, and had hit a run rate of about $100 million at the end of 2012. Trade Desk is one of the partners powering Facebook’s ad exchange, and Green says his shop is already profitable.

(Shutterstock/Everett Collection)

But this Rube Goldberg holiday greeting video, from ad tech start-up Solve Media is both awesome and 100 percent authentic. Also, there is a cat!

If you are very honest with yourself and your employer, you are almost certainly going to have a couple minutes of downtime in the next couple days. So, watch:

What’s that? You still have more time to kill? Happy to help. Here’s another Goldbergian tribute, from video maker/band OK Go:

The not-quite-as-good news, at least for the ad-tech guys: It looks like the Exchange is always going to be a side project for Facebook.

So says Bernstein Research analyst Carlos Kirjner, who figures that Facebook Exchange ads, which let advertisers pitch you based on your Web traffic history, will only end up accounting for 15 percent to 20 percent of Facebook’s old-fashioned Web ads. Those are the ones that run on the right side of the service’s page when you look at it on a PC.

That’s still a very big business, since those are the ads that generate about 80 percent of Facebook’s advertising business right now. But Facebook’s future is based on “newsfeed” ads — particularly the ones it will show mobile users — and Exchange targeting won’t work there.*

And Kirjner figures that the Facebook Exchange will be capped when it comes to its conventional ads, too. That’s for two reasons: He says there simply may not be enough demand to turn Facebook’s huge pool of regular ads into retargeted ones. And he says Facebook will move slowly with this stuff to avoid setting off alarms with U.S. and European regulators, who are already sniffing around retargeting and privacy issues.

But even if the Facebook Exchange plays a limited role for the company, it’s still an important one. Kirjner predicts that Exchange ads will help slow the decline of Facebook’s conventional ad business, which is dropping off as users head to the mobile Web.

If the Exchange wasn’t around, he says, conventional ad pricing would drop 5 percent next year, and 5 percent the year after that. But after factoring in the growth of Facebook Exchange, which adds a big pricing premium, Kirjner figures those ads will remain flat next year, and drop a bit in 2014.

That is: Without the Exchange, this chart would show a much steeper drop.

*Kirjner does think the company’s first efforts at mobile are working, by the way, and has moved his rating from “market-perform” to “outperform” — in conventional English, that’s a “buy.”

And the rest of you have probably never heard of it. That’s in part because Facebook itself hasn’t said much about it. It kept its partners under a tight gag order throughout the summer until last month, when it allowed them to hand out a few upbeat anecdotes. And none of that stuff will make sense to a regular human being.

So we asked Triggit CEO Zach Coelius to try to explain what Facebook is up to, using as much plain English as possible.

Coelius isn’t close to being a neutral observer, because he’s been an enthusiastic Facebook partner. But he’s a good explainer, and relatively candid.

One scenario to keep in mind as you read the interview: If Coelius is right, and the Exchange adds dramatic value to the cheap ads Facebook is using it for right now, what would happen if the company relented and offered the Exchange on all of its ads?

Two theories, which aren’t mutually exclusive:

• Facebook’s overall revenue shoots up, as the company conforms to the way most of the Web ad world does business.
• Facebook’s value flattens or drops, because Facebook will have conceded that it hasn’t been able to figure out a revolutionary new way to sell ads. Instead, it’s just like any other big Web publisher with lots of inventory. Like, say, Yahoo or AOL. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad business, but it’s a whole lot less exciting than a world-changing one.

Kafka: Let’s go over the basics of ad retargeting, and how Facebook’s exchange uses that technique.

Coelius: Retargeting lets advertisers utilize data they have about their customers. When I go to Backcountry.com and I look at a pair of skis, in the same way that Backcountry.com might send me an email saying, “Hey, you know these skis are on sale, you should buy them,” or the way that they would change their site to show me the skis that I looked at the last time, when I visit again — they can also do the same thing with their ads. So that, when they show you their ads, they can show ads about things that you’re interested in. So, on Facebook, they’re now enabling those advertisers to do that, too.

So you’re buying the ads from Facebook and reselling them to your advertisers?

Coelius: We work with the exchanges, and they use a technology called real-time bidding, which means that in real time, as the page is loading, the exchange will call to us and say, “Hey, Triggit, this user ID [which represents an anonymous Web surfer] is available, are you interested in showing them an ad?” And we say, “Oh, yeah, this guy wants to buy a pair of skis from Backcountry — we think he does, he looked at a pair of skis recently — let’s show him a Backcountry ad with a pair of skis in it.”

And how do the Facebook exchange ads perform against those you buy on other exchanges, like Google’s?

We kind of went into this in the beginning saying, “Facebook’s huge, and they’re opening up to data-driven advertising, and if it performs just as well as everything else we do, we’re going to be very happy.” And, for us, it has been an amazing and wonderful surprise — the performance has been so much better than anything else we’ve ever done.

Why?

There’s a number of reasons for that. The ad units actually are very good — they’re always “in view,” there’s no fraud …

These are the small “marketplace” ads you see on the right side of the page, right?

At this point. Those ads are small, but they’re actually good ads, relative to some of the other ads we’ve bought.

Really? Because some buyers I’ve talked to have complained that those small ads don’t give them enough room to do anything compelling.

The ad units are smaller than some of the others that we have, and if they were bigger they would work better. But they’re definitely not limited, and they’re not working poorly. They’re working incredibly well. I could only imagine what we could do if they gave us a bigger canvas to paint on.

Why else do you think the Facebook ads work?

On most of the other exchanges that we buy, the traffic patterns and the usage of those Web sites is often either search-driven traffic or browsing traffic. Traffic where the user is looking to do something, or looking to find something, or read about something. Facebook is a communication utility; it’s something that people always have open, and they’re there. And what we’re finding is that when they do engage with the ads, they’re converting at much higher rates. If they stop what they’re doing on Facebook and turn and click on an ad, and go to our customer’s Web sites — they buy.

Really? Because that’s the standard advertising critique of Facebook — that people aren’t there to buy anything. They’re there because they want to hang out with their friends, and they don’t want to see ads, and they don’t respond to them.

We never bought on Facebook before they opened up to real-time bidding, so we can’t speak to what went on before. But what we’ve always seen is that when you provide users with ads around the things that they’re interested in, they engage with those ads.

But, to beat this into the ground: The whole premise of your industry is that Web sites don’t matter, people do. That you can find interested customers for your clients all across the Web, and that the data about those people is more important than what site they’re on.

I don’t always say it’s one or the other. I would say the site, at least in this case, with Facebook, definitely matters. But being able to know what a user is interested in, and show them ads around that, definitely makes them better and more relevant.

So, how big can the exchange and retargeting get for Facebook?

Obviously Facebook is gigantic — 25 to 35 percent of the entire Web. So they’re big. The volume at this point is ramping incredibly quickly. We haven’t gotten to the full scale that is Facebook, but the dial is turning very quickly, and Q4 is coming up. And I would be very surprised if we don’t go to full scale in relatively short order.

Do you think they’ll end up allowing retargeting on all their ads?

I have no idea. They have grand plans, and they’re going to do grand things. I hope they open this up more broadly. There’s no reason why they can’t apply the data to sponsored stories or premium ads or mobile — we could apply it across the board.

Here’s one way: Take the small “marketplace” ads the company runs on the margins of its pages and make them more valuable, by letting marketers use their own targeting data to pitch the social networks’ users.

That’s the premise behind the “Facebook Exchange” the company launched three months ago.

Since then, Facebook executives have placed a cone of silence around the project. Now it’s letting some of the ad tech companies that have been piloting Facebook Exchange talk about their experiences.

Not surprisingly, Facebook’s ad partners have lots of positive stuff to say about advertising on Facebook. Alas, no one is releasing comprehensive data about Facebook Exchange’s performance so far.

Instead we have selected data points about selected campaigns, released by companies with more than a rooting interest. Some of the press releases I’ve seen are even less useful than that — they simply announce that company X is working with Facebook, and is excited about that fact.

So you’ll understand why I’m not going to recap each one for you.

Instead, here’s the most useful, apples-to-apples data set I’ve seen, from retargeting start-up TellApart:

• The average “user click-through rate” for the ads it has run on Facebook exchange has been 6.65 percent — slightly better than the 6.41 percent it gets on Google’s rival AdX.
• Its customer OnlineShoes.com has had the most success with Facebook Exchange, generating click-through rates of 15.6 percent, compared to 12.7 percent at Google.
• Customers who do click on the Facebook ads end up spending $159 per average order, compared to $163 for Google.

I’m quite sure that not every online ad buyer that has used Facebook Exchange is ecstatic about the results, because I’ve talked to some who weren’t that impressed. One gripe I heard: The marketplace ads themselves — the small boxes you normally see on the right-hand side of your Facebook home page — simply aren’t big enough to display an effective marketing message, no matter how targeted they are.

But for argument’s sake, let’s say that Facebook’s ad targeting program does work as advertised. If so, J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth figures that for every percentage point of marketplace impressions Facebook sells through Facebook Exchange, its U.S. ad revenue could jump 2 percent to 3 percent.

That’s not the same as solving the mobile riddle for Zuckerberg and company. But it would be a very nice boost.

Now another top AdMeld employee is out: Jason Kelly, the company’s former chief revenue officer, is running Sociomantic Labs, a Berlin-based ad tech company that’s expanding from its European base into the U.S.

Jumping from AdMeld to the start-up means that Kelly has flipped his focus. AdMeld was a “supply-side platform,” which meant it worked on behalf of publishers trying to negotiate prices with ad buyers; Sociomantic is a “demand-side platform” used by ad buyers.

There are a whole lot of demand-side platforms in the U.S. already — including Invite Media, the one Google bought two years ago — but Kelly says Sociomantic will carve out a niche by focusing almost entirely on e-commerce companies like eBay that “retarget” Web users who visit their sites.

One other big difference between Sociomantic and other DSPs: It hasn’t taken on any venture funding. Many of its U.S. peers are stuffed with VC money, at valuations that may prove difficult to achieve.

The new product, Ning VIP, is a subscription-based service starting at $1,000 monthly, offering a suite of tools for larger-scale social networks. It’s appropriate for a site with a larger customer base like an MTV or a Food Network, rather than a smaller niche community. Some of the new tools combine attributes found on other social networks, like activity feeds, badging and other game-like features.

“Call it Facebook in a box,” said Samir Arora, Glam Media CEO and Chairman. Only Ning’s networks give more granular control over community management features, Arora argues.

The fruits of the Glam acquisition seem to be found in the other half of Wednesday’s announcement, dubbed Glam Social. It’s essentially an entire ad tech platform wrapped up in a bow for the network owner, complete with a social analytics dashboard that tracks engagement inside Ning as well as social metrics on other integrated networks, like Facebook and Twitter. Glam can build ads for users inside of their own network, making it simpler on the network owner.

The other claim Arora trumpets: A full mobile Web autocreation package set up for network owners. So, for new Ning customers, an HTML5-optimized version of their network is set up for them, as well.

Since the acquisition, Arora says, Ning has been growing well, with more than 50 million monthly active users across Ning networks, adding more than 2,000 new networks per month to the nearly 80,000 that already exist.

Will the new, glammed-up version of Ning bolster those ranks? Perhaps, especially for those who don’t want to look to an outside ad tech platform to monitor community engagement.

Which is why none of them will talk about it to the press. They’re terrified that if they do, Facebook will kick them out of the club — which is what many people in ad tech believe has already happened to two of them.

The story I’m hearing, from people who aren’t supposed to tell me about it: After news of the Facebook Exchange leaked to the press last week, Facebook came clean and announced its list of preliminary partners (TellApart, Triggit, Turn, DataXu, MediaMath, AppNexus, The Trade Desk and AdRoll). And then it told all of them not to talk to the press, or they’d be cut off.

Who got the boot? Well, nailing that one down is a bit tricky, since no one’s supposed to talk about it. And if those two companies want back into the club, they’re certainly not going to say anything.

But if you had to bet, the most likely wager would be on DataXu and MediaMath. That’s because the CEOs of both companies published bylined pieces about Facebook Exchange in Forbes and AdAge, respectively, within a couple of days of the initial announcement.

Hard to see how there’s anything in either piece that Facebook would find objectionable, since they’re both (unsurprisingly) overwhelmingly positive about the program.

But if Facebook’s point is that the only company talking about Facebook’s ad program should be Facebook, then you could guess that Facebook wouldn’t be happy about either piece.

And if you’re looking for Facebook to clear this up, then I would like to offer you some shares in the upcoming Brooklyn Bridge IPO.

DataXu and MediaMath “are still on our list of partners,” says Facebook rep Brandon McCormick, via email. “We aren’t commenting on timing for any specific partners.”

So now that you’ve seen it, do you understand who Turn is, or what they do? If you’re in ad tech, you probably already did. They’re one of a handful of very-well-funded “demand-side platforms” that help ad buyers negotiate various ad exchanges. Google bought one of these a couple of years ago, and everyone is trying to figure out what will happen to the rest.

But if you’re not in ad tech, like nearly everyone who watches “Mad Men,” Turn’s ad won’t mean anything to you.

I guess that makes it like the ads that conglomerates like ADM or Lockheed used to run on Sunday-morning political shows. They were only relevant for a handful of viewers — the people who write or influence laws — but the ad guys were reasonably assured that most of that handful would be watching.

Presumably, this is exactly the kind of imprecise targeting that Turn is supposed to fix. But, whatever, I’m writing about it here.

Totally unrelated note: I’m not a huge “Mad Men” fan*, but even a quick glance at this ad shows you just how seriously the “Mad Men” casting and production people take their jobs. The Turn ad instantly evokes “Mad Men,” but it also looks nothing like “Mad Men,” and if I was in production, I could articulate why. So I can just say that it looks … off. Definitely not period. Especially the blonde.

Still reading? You like this stuff. Go see more here, including an “alternate ending” version that’s pretty clever.

*I like reading about “Mad Men” more than I enjoy watching it. Meanwhile, I’m pretty psyched for just about any kind of reality-TV cooking competition, no matter how silly (see: MasterChef Season 3**). But I have zero desire to read about those shows.

**Best TV villain of the summer: Joe Bastianich, again.

Sources say Rubicon paid around $10 million for the two-year-old company.

Rubicon helps publishers manage and optimize their display ads via “real time” buying, and the pitch is that they’ll now be able to do that with mobile ads, too — though the still-nascent mobile ad business has yet to fully embrace that kind of technology.

Rubicon’s rivals include Pubmatic and Google’s AdMeld. In September 2010, it picked up ad tech assets from News Corp., which also owns this site. Mobsmith raised a reported $575,000 in July 2010.

Assuming Yahoo gives its interim CEO real power — either by making him its actual CEO, or at least letting him behave as if he has the job — then he’ll finally have full control of a giant media company. That’s something he’s been working toward for a long time, despite his rep as a guy who enjoys buying companies more than running them.

Just like his predecessors, Levinsohn will have to untie Yahoo’s knotty Asian problem. He’ll also have to spend time repairing relationships with Facebook and figuring out what to do with a Microsoft search deal that hasn’t been a huge success.

But if Levinsohn gets to run Yahoo the way he wants to run Yahoo, he’ll focus on getting the most out of its media business, because that’s his strength.

Bear in mind that this is still a huge business — the portal attracts some 700 million visitors a month, which helped it generate nearly $1 billion in ad sales last quarter. But that business is listing and under attack from Google, Facebook, and a swarm of nimble start-ups pulling eyeballs and dollars away.

If you want to get a sense of what Levinsohn may try to do next, it’s good to review what he did last year, when he had control of the company’s U.S. operations — and what he tried to do but couldn’t get done.

• Ads: Yahoo used to have one of the Web’s best sales operations, but those days are long gone. Levisonsohn spent much of 2011 trying to fix that. Part of that involved restaffing his team, and part of it was a strategy that was supposed to cut out some of the ad tech middlemen and allow the company to increase its yield on the ads it sold. Those moves, which included a would-be alliance between Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, all went into a holding pattern when Scott Thompson took over in January. Levinsohn will try restarting that again now.
• M&A: Levinsohn has a reputation as a dealmaker because he’s made some pretty big deals. Most notably, he brought Myspace to News Corp. in 2005, then helped the company secure a $900 million ad deal with Google (News Corp. also owns this Web site). Last year, he tried to land another big fish, when he pushed to pursue Hulu. But Levinsohn couldn’t get buy-in from then-CEO Carol Bartz, and Hulu’s owners decided not to sell after all. I think Levinsohn would still be interested in the site under certain conditions, but he’d need more cash than he has on hand to do it. Selling off his Asian assets might make that possible. If he can’t land Hulu, I don’t see him chasing after Instagram-like companies with big price tags and no near-term revenue plans. I do see him making some plays on cheaper start-ups, as well as some technology plays, to shore up/replace the company’s very old infrastructure/platforms.

This is the pitch, more or less, for Spongecell, a start-up that helps produce “rich media” Web ads. That’s not a new idea, by any stretch, and there are plenty of competitors that do similar stuff. But last year the company’s story still attracted angel investors like Google chair Eric Schmidt.

And now the company has new funding: Tech investor/holding company Safeguard Scientifics has taken all of a $10 million B round.

The money will go to help Spongecell expand smaller product lines, like video ads, and eventually move into new ones, like mobile ads, says CEO Ben Kartzman.

Spongecell is a full-fledged “pivot”: Prior to 2008, it had raised $3 million and was trying to sell some sort of “event management” widget that Kartzman readily admits got no traction. Then it moved into ad tech, and things have been humming since. Kartzman says that last year he grossed around $10 million and cleared “seven figures” of profit.

Big picture: Smart people keep telling me that the ad tech ecosystem has too many start-ups funded with too much money, and that something has to give. But then I keep hearing about another ad tech start-up raising another round. Assume we’ll see more of these for a while.

That brings the price tag for Adobe’s two-year ad business shopping spree to $2.4 billion. The bulk of that comes from Adobe’s 2009 acquisition of Omniture for $1.8 billion; it has also recently picked up Auditude and Demdex.

Adobe’s appetite for ad technology has been good news for a handful of investors who have been betting on the sector. In the case of Efficient Frontier, the deal is a big win for Mitsui & Co., Redpoint Ventures and Cambrian Ventures, who put less than $15 million into the start-up.

But while lots of VC cash has gone into ad tech in the past few years, there haven’t been a ton of big exits.

Beyond Adobe, the only other active buyer has been Google. And industry executives say that some ad tech firms looking for more funding are having trouble getting the dollars they want.

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.

Google declined to comment; AdMeld CEO Michael Barrett hasn’t responded to requests for comment.

Google’s display ad team, led by Neal Mohan, has spent the last couple years expanding its footprint in the ad tech ecosystem. In 2009, it bought Teracent, which customizes online ads on the fly. A year ago, it bought Invite Media, which helps ad buyers place orders for ad inventory via “real time” ad exchanges. And all of this stuff hovers around its DoubleClick ad exchange platform, which it bought in 2007 and relaunched last year.

Here’s one way to think about the ad tech landscape: A chart created by Luma Partners banker Terry Kawaja, which shows the dizzying number of companies that have cropped up in recent years. Don’t worry if you can’t understand it — it’s designed in part to be a bit obtuse and intimidating. What’s important to recognize here is that up until now Google has had a presence on the left side and center of the chart; if the AdMeld deal goes through, it will extend its reach to the right side, too.

[UPDATE: Thanks to the several readers that pointed out that I don't know how to read a chart, and more important, that I've understated Google's existing relationship with publishers: Google's DFP platform already serves ads for publishers, and the DoubleClick exchange sells ads on their behalf, too. A better way of making the point: The AdMeld deal will give Google even more ways to do business with publishers.]

Will Washington sign off on this one? Google obviously thinks so, and the fact that Google got the go-ahead for an even larger deal last year — its $750 million AdMob purchase — should give it confidence.

One difference, though: Last year, Google successfully argued that buying AdMob wouldn’t make it dominant in the mobile advertising industry because the mobile advertising industry barely existed.

Displays ads, however, are a real business, in the single-digit billions. That number will grow much bigger — Google chairman Eric Schmidt has thrown out a $200 billion goal — but right now Google, via DoubleClick, has a big chunk of what’s there. Earlier today Mohan gave a speech at an industry conference outlining his vision for the market; you can see a summary here.

AdMeld’s two primary competitors have been Rubicon and Pubmatic. Last year News Corp., which also owns this Web site, merged its display ad technology assets with Rubicon.

TechCrunch first reported news of the Google AdMeld deal.

That’s the basic premise behind Metamarkets, a 2-year old startup that just raised another $6 million.

This was an inside round, with most of the folks who invested $2.5 million a year ago re-upping: Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures led the round, and previous investors including Village Ventures, True Ventures, Omnicom vet Jerry Neumann and Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley chipped in.

CEO David Soloff says Metamarkets now has 3 paying clients, and is recording between 3 and 5 billion “events” — ad impressions bought and sold – per day. Metamarkets stores and analyzes all of that data — it’s up to 500 terabytes so far — and the publishers are supposed to use it to help them figure out how much to price their inventory in real-time. It’s also supposed to let them predict what kind of business they’ll be able to do in the future.

Originally, the company thought it would also compile that data to create the equivalent of stock index, which buyers and sellers could use to gauge the state of the ad market.

The idea: If  you were buying inventory from, say, Google, it’d be good to know how the rest of the market was performing. But for now Soloff says they’re busy with the proprietary products they’re selling directly to ad sellers.

Metamarkets will use the money to build out its 14-person engineering team. But the company’s existing workforce is already doing something right: I’m told that Twitter, among other potential acquirers, did some tire-kicking before the company closed this round. Soloff wouldn’t comment on that line of questioning; I’ve asked Twitter but don’t expect to hear much from them, either.