There are some very interesting rumors going around in the ad serving technology market today. DoubleClick, which is the ad server for huge sites such as Yahoo! and AOL, may be bought out by Microsoft…or even Google.

The company was purchased by a private-equity firm for $1.2 billion, but it looks like they are interesting in selling the company, or even creating an IPO for an estimated $2.0 billion. Microsoft is said to be one of the top choices for picking up DoubleClick. What would this mean for competing publishers such as Yahoo! and AOL?

The most interesting part of the news is that there are rumors of Google developing its own ad server that would compete with the likes of DoubleClick’s system. The ad server system would be nothing like AdWords, but it would allow publishers to traffic any kind of ads, regardless of it being from Google or not. The questions to ask is:

• Will it cost money?
• If it’s free, how will Google monetize on it?
  • My guess is that publishers would be required to run at least a certain percentage of Google ad inventory
• Who will the customers be?
  • Is it mean for any site that needs an ad server? Or will it be for corporate companies such as AOL and Yahoo!? Or will it meet both markets?

Whatever happens, the next few months will definitely be interesting in the ad serving world.