I know Pat McCarthy (Conversionrater.com) works at Right Media but somehow, I missed the news that Yahoo! bought 20% of Right Media last October.  I even met Pat McCarthy briefly at TechCrunch 8 in New York City last November (but never asked him about it).  By the way, Conversionrater has been one of the top Web Analytics blogs.

Well….guess what?  Fueled partly by the Google DoubleClick acquisition, Yahoo! announced yesterday it was buying the rest of Right Media for $680 Million Dollars. I think he sounds pretty happy, based on what I'm reading on his blog (I hope he owns stock in Right Media - let's put it that way).

According to the New York Times:

"…Right Media, a four-year-old company, runs an exchange in which advertisers and publishers buy and sell online ad placements in real time through an auction system. DoubleClick, which specializes in serving ads on Web sites, announced recently that it would develop a similar type of exchange. Online publishers are increasingly turning to exchanges like these to sell ad space on their sites.

Yahoo executives said that the company had been using the Right Media exchange since last year, largely to place ads on Yahoo’s Web sites, and had become more comfortable with its capabilities.

….By buying Right Media, analysts have said, Yahoo would accelerate its own efforts to sell and broker ads on other sites. Those efforts began taking shape recently, after Yahoo reached agreements to sell ads on eBay and on some 264 newspaper Web sites. "

Sounds like the acquisition of Right Media was a good move for Yahoo (and good for Pat too).