Google Joins Recess Brawl Over DoubleClick: but are they even worth it?
The
WSJ story that came out last week that DoubleClick
is for sale was greeted with oohs and ahhs by everyone who thought that
Microsoft was a shoo-in for the ad serving company and the
DART technology that would come with it. With more than 1,500 clients and a
well-developed system of targeting, delivering, and tracking online ads, it
would have given Microsoft a much-needed leg up on Google: $150 million to $200 million, to be exact. AG Edwards analyst
Kevin Bittigieg remarked (via Mediapost)
that DoubleClick’s platform “would provide a boost to Microsoft’s online
services ambitions which have so far been lackluster.” Lackluster? You can say
that again.
But
suddenly, things have gotten complicated. In a move that probably has private equity firm Heller & Friedman greedily
rubbing their hands together (they bought DoubleClick in 2005 for $1.1
billion), Google has decided to join in the bidding war. Two billion? Chump change. What about
Yahoo! and Time Warner, we are asking ourselves. Yeah, what about them.
Here’s
another question: What’s left of DoubleClick anyway? Pieces of it have been
sold off during the past two years, like its Abacus data management unit,
reports B2B
Online. What remains is their online ad business, which is what everyone is
all fired up about anyway, considering, as Shar Van Boskirk of Forrester
Research declares, that “Online advertising is back in vogue.”
But Phil Wainewright has an interesting take
on it in his post on ZDNet.
His view is that the whole ordeal is all for nothing, because DoubleClick
serves banner ads – which, according to him (and
Tim O’Reilly) is sooooo last century. The future, he says, is in the PPA
(Pay Per Action) beta that Google is developing, or, more likely, the Context
Links that Amazon has implemented that ultimately becomes a PPP (Pay Per
Purchase) system.
But watch out, Googs has been sneaking around behind our backs yet again. This is madness, I tell you. Madness!
