SAN FRANCISCO, June 13 (Xinhua) -- Google on Monday confirmed that it had signed an agreement to buy Admeld, an on-line advertising optimization firm, in a deal seen as the Internet search giant's latest move to bolster its on-line display ad business.

Admeld, launched in 2007 and headquartered in New York City, has developed a service that can help on-line publishers manage their ad space more efficiently and profitably.

Admeld now has more than 500 customers worldwide, among them are FOX News, IDG TechNetwork, Discovery and The Weather Channel, according to information posted on its website.

"By combining Admeld's services, expertise and technology with Google's offerings, we're investing in what we hope will be an improved era of flexible ad management tools for major publishers, " Neal Mohan, Google's vice president of display advertising, said in a blog post announcing the deal.

"We believe that this investment will be an important step to help on-line publishers, and will further improve and grow the display advertising industry as a whole," Mohan noted.

On-line display ads usually appear in forms that consist of images and may be interactive. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a U.S. trade association, display-related on- line ad revenue in the United States totaled nearly 10 billion U.S. dollars in 2010.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by the two companies. TechCrunch, a technology blog site, has reported that Google paid around 400 million dollars.

(Source:English.news.cn)