Google to buy Doubleclick for $3.1 Billion

Search engine leader Google is buying privately held DoubleClick, a top digital marketing services firm, for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies said Friday afternoon.

Google is buying DoubleClick from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, which bought DoubleClick in 2005 for $1.1 billion in a deal that took the company private. For Google, the deal will likely help boost its presence in the area of Internet display advertising, ads on banners, videos and other non-text based types of ads. DoubleClick specializes on placing and serving banners and other display ads on prominent Web sites. Google has been bulking up in this area through last year's acquisition of online video firm YouTube, but still trails rival Yahoo! in the display market.

"DoubleClick's technology is widely adopted by leading advertisers, publishers and agencies, and the combination of the two companies will accelerate the adoption of Google's innovative advances in display advertising," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a statement.

The companies added in the statement that the deal, which should close by the end of the year, will lead to more relevant ads for consumers and a more efficient ad buying and selling process for online publishers and advertisers.

During a conference call with analysts on Friday afternoon, Schmidt said Google had been thinking about making this acquisition for a "very, very long time."

Schmidt added that the addition of DoubleClick to Google's business would strengthen Google's position with large brand-name advertisers, who tend to rely more on display ads than the search ads that are Google's bread and butter business.

Google's deal for DoubleClick is both a blow to Yahoo and Microsoft, which also was said to be interested in buying DoubleClick. Microsoft owns MSN, the third largest search firm, and has struggled to catch up with Google and Yahoo in the online advertising business.

Source: Google Press Center: Press Release

More: Inside AdSense: DoubleClick acquisition

Very interesting development. Fortunately SEO is still a viable alternative to paid advertising SEM.

I got a very very bad feeling about this. I think I will be making a proactive move very soon and begin really pushing private ads on my sites.

Google's going to buy the internet one day.

It's already a 49% stakeholder of it anyways.

Soon there will be tons of anti google people all around like anti microsoft guys.

I don't have a concern with google continuing to grow, I just don't like the recent changes to adwords/adsense.

I mentioned the beta program introduced to advertisers a while back where they could site target ads on sites, but intstead of paying CPM to adsense advertisers, they could set their ads up to show on a CPC basis.

Then, they open up beta a beta program for adsense users to use CPA advertising.

Now, acquiring doubleclick, I think this will even further destroy adsense as we have come to know it over the years as publishers.

My CPM revenue for site targeted ads has already went into the toilet over the past couple months, followed by a drop in CPC, and now lately I have also begung to enjoy a nice drop in Click Through Ratio. During this time, doubleclick ads have been showing up on my sites quite often, which had me figuring that google would be the ones to win this bidding.

i blogged about this a few days ago:
http://www.skeymedia.com/advertising...c-advertising/

So now that Google has acquired the Internet advertising giant DoubleClick, what are they planning to do with its search marketing company Performics? You mean, Google now owns one of the largest SEO companies in the world? Yep!

1. Google Buys DoubleClick
2. DoubleClick owns Performics
3. Google decides to keep Performics

Initial reaction may be that there is a conflict of interest by Google owning one of the largest search marketing firms in the business, since the goal Performics is to rank their clients highly and efficiently on Google and other search engines.

Performics clients include:

America Online, Blair Corp., Bose, Cingular, CompUSA, Eddie Bauer, Fairmont Hotels, HP Shopping, J. Jill, Jos. A. Banks, Kohl’s, L.L. Bean, Motorola, OfficeMax, PC Connection, RedEnvelope, My Sony, Quickbook, Staples, Verizon Wireless, and Wyndham Hotels.

Such services offered by Performics include paid search marketing, ‘natural’ search engine optimization and data feed marketing.

So, Performics is essentially an SEO company owned by Google.

Here some bizarre language on the Google DoubleClick acquisition FAQ:

Q. What will Google do with Performics?
A. Performics is part of DoubleClick, and we are acquiring it as part of the transaction. We have no plans to dispose of it at this time.

‘No plans to dispose’ of Performics? Dispose is an interesting choice of words.
What do you think Google will do with Performics?