• The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, September 5, 2007 10:15 AM

Yahoo has agreed to buy the online advertising network BlueLithium for approximately $300 million. The closely held company buys display inventory and then resells it to advertisers in a variety of targeted packages, including behavioral targeting. The big news: Yahoo plans to integrate BlueLithium's behavioral targeting technology with its own, deploying it across Yahoo's sites in addition to the ad network's 1,000 partner sites.

One criticism of behavioral targeting has been its limited scope; the combined network will allow advertisers to buy large, targeted segments of users who have demonstrated interests or certain behaviors while surfing the network. The move underscores Yahoo's belief that moving into the ad brokerage business will boost its online advertising sector, which delivered a disappointing 2.3 percent drop in second-quarter profit in July.

"With our goal of creating the largest global ad network, this really moves us along the continuum," said Todd Teresi, senior vice president of the Yahoo Publisher Network, which will handle the advertiser relationships of the combined network.

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