The rise of private exchanges

One of the biggest trends over the last year has been the rise of private exchanges, giving publishers the benefits of accessing performance display from selected partners without having to commoditize their inventory.
Admeld has seen great success by being an early adopter of this solution, and the other exchanges have followed. Google has just launched  Direct Deals, which is their first version of a private exchange allowing fixed price connections for certain advertisers. We have been working with Google to test this new feature, which Google just announced :
http://doubleclickpublishers.blogspot.com/2011/09/introducing-ad-exchange-direct-deals.html 

Premium publishers, such as The Washington Post and About.com, have been early testers of this feature working with leading exchange buyers such as Criteo, who specializes in expanding search budgets into display. For Criteo, this feature has meant new opportunities to connect with publishers. “Working directly with publishers has always been critical for Criteo, as a way to access the best inventory and deliver the highest CPMs to publishers. We are delighted to be using Direct Deals as a new way to achieve this, with all the advantages of a real-time mechanism,” said Jonathan Wolf, Chief Buying Officer at Criteo.