Big news breaking (first in the NYT) that Yahoo has fully acquired Right Media for $680 million in cash and stock.

Right Media’s Right Media Exchange provides Yahoo with a way to delineate itself from Google (with it’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick) in the online advertising space (specifically graphical ads)…

“The acquisition of Right Media will further Yahoo!’s goal to create the industry’s most open, accessible and vibrant advertising marketplace, which will help democratize the buying and selling of digitally enabled advertising,” said Terry Semel, chairman and CEO of Yahoo!. “This acquisition is an important step in our long-term vision to build the industry’s leading advertising and publisher ecosystem. We believe that Yahoo!’s open approach is a clear differentiator from others in the industry and provides significant benefits to advertisers, publishers and Yahoo! itself.“

Yahoo has owned 20% of Right Media since last October, but in this move completes the buyout. The interesting part of this story is the exchange and auction type system which Yahoo sees as a valuable component for the future growth of it’s Panama and ad serving system. According to the NYT piece, DoubleClick is developing a similar auction style system as well.

The battle ground is in the brokering of graphical display ads. So far has been won by Yahoo but with the Google acquisition of DoubleClick, this area is sure to heat up going forward.

“Yahoo! is the largest online publisher and one of the leading ad networks on the web, and we believe it is in our strong financial interest to make sure there is a widely adopted, neutral, frictionless exchange that enables publishers and advertisers to benefit from a basket of the best solutions rather than having to accept a single solution from one of the larger players,” said Susan Decker, head of advertiser and publisher group and CFO of Yahoo!. “Furthermore, as the industry’s partner of choice and as a leader in both search and display advertising, we believe that we are well-positioned to rally the industry support to make the promise of Right Media a reality for the entire digital media community.”

Right Media’s Pat McCarthy has offered some thoughts on the acquisiton on his blog (one of my personal favorites), ConversionRater, which are definitely worthwhile to read as well.