An unprecedented ad network agreement between three of the largest display ad sellers is now official. Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft have confirmed plans to pool together their unsold inventory in a deal that aims to increase their margins, secure higher prices for remnant ads, and augment the reach available to agencies and advertisers.

At its core, the deal is not so different from what ad networks have been doing for years, which is resell each others' inventory. By early next year, the companies aim to inegrate one another's real-time bidding platforms to facilitate the availability of non-reserved inventory, creating much larger scale and efficiency for their sales organizations.

The joint platforms underlying the ad integration will be the Microsoft Advertising Exchange, built on AppNexus, and Yahoo's Right Media Exchange. Each company will set its own controls for how it operates within the real-time bidding environment.

Read more: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2124572/Yahoo-Microsoft-AOL-Confirm-Display-Ad-Deal