In its attempt to boost ad revenue and win the advertising share competition with Google, Yahoo! has decided to buy online ad group BlueLithium for almost $300m, a deal bound to be completed by the last quarter of 2007.

Ranked the fifth-largest advertising network in the US and being the first in the UK, the three-year BlueLithium has 145 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore Media Metrix. Named Innovator of the Year by Always On in 2006 and receiving enough votes to be included in the top 100 private companies in America, the group earned Yahoo!’s trust to become a wholly-owned subsidiary.

120-employee BlueLithium purchases banners and other sorts of graphical-display ad slots on almost 1,000 sites of other Web publishers and it further sells them to advertisers. BlueLithium is a legitimate choice for Yahoo! who announced a 2.3 percent drop in the second quarter ad revenue, as Todd Teresi, senior vice president of the Yahoo Publisher Network highlighted: “With our goal of creating the largest global ad network, this really moves us along the continuum.”

The San Jose, Calif.-based ad network initially planned to hold public offering in the near future, now considering itself perfect for Yahoo!’s struggle to augment the number of places of the advertisements it sells. The gist of BlueLithium business strategy is the so-called behavioral-targeting technology, enabling advertisers to have their ads displayed to certain groups of consumers based on their online interests.

Yahoo!, also completed the purchase of Right Media Inc., an online-advertising company in April in change of $680 million, after initially buying a 20 percent stake of the company in October.

In June Yahoo, decided to combine its Search and Display advertising sales teams in the US under the management of David Karnstedt, currently senior vice president of Yahoo's Search sales business.

Internet giants have shown a well-determined interest in developing their online ad revenues, with important purchases made by Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Shortly after Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billions, the Redmond company announced the acquisition of digital marketing firm aQuantive for 6 billion dollars in a bid to prevent Google's total domination of the online advertising market.

In July, Time Warner’s AOL announced it will acquire ad firm TACODA which offers a technology that enables advertisers to serve highly relevant ads based on consumers’ online behaviors,for an undisclosed sum. According to sources familiar with the deal the company paid $275 million for TACODA.