…rich media, that is. Third party ad tags are now cool with Google on the AdSense network. That means mo’ money. Look at the list of approved third parties:
* Advertiser ad servers: DoubleClick (DFA), Mediaplex
* Rich media agencies: DoubleClick Rich Media, Eyeblaster, EyeWonder, Interpolls, PointRoll, Unicast
* Research firms: Dynamic Logic, IAG Research, InsightExpress, Factor TG
Focus on the middle, my friends. The third line is to prove it out, the first line, well, they own DClick, and Mediaplex is pretty small. What’s not there? Atlas. That’s owned by Microsoft. I’m sure it was just a technical error.
I read a post on this earlier on the search engine watch blog. It’s good to see they’re expanding.
No matter who owns the ad server in question, what’s getting served is ultimately just a piece of javascript. Note that the list of third-party servers you reference is the list of *certified* servers, not *permitted* servers. If Google really wants to prevent Atlas from participating, they could only allow code pointing to certain servers. But that would be ridiculous, and would be counterproductive in terms of their own scalability.
What’s more likely is that Google extended a token offer to Atlas to get certified, and Atlas declined to participate.