Breaking: Google Spends $3.1 Billion To Acquire DoubleClick

wow!

Wow - That’s a BIG Acquisition! The question is — is it worth that much?

What do you think?

300mil/year …. plus an obvious growth strategy …. I think so

great googly moogly! 2 youtubes!

I think so too:

http://techfold.com/2007/04/13.....1-billion/

Inventory/Software/Relationships/KillMicrosoft — its all upside.

Not only double the size of Youtube, but the whole $3.1B was in CASH. Compare that to Youtube, where only $15 MILLION of the $1.6B deal is in cash. Google can’t just churn out more stock to cover this deal…they had to dig into their cash reserves (of which, admittedly, they have a lot.)

Obviously they are trying to create a monopoly on online advertising by buying out any potential competitor. Like the youtube purchase, it will be a waste of $3.1B.

You can listen to the conference call:

“The company will host a conference call and webcast at 2:45 p.m. Pacific Time (5:45 p.m. Eastern Time) today to discuss the acquisition. To access the conference call, please dial 866-288-0543 domestic and 913-312-6664 internationally. A replay of the call will be available until midnight, Friday, April 20, 2007 at 888-203-1112 domestically and 719-457-0820 internationally. Confirmation code for the replay is 8456893.

A live audio webcast of the conference call will be available at:

http://investor.google.com/webcast.html

P.S. Oh snap! Another defeat for Microsoft. w00t!

leaving msft/goog competition aside,

wall street dealmakers 1, google dealmakers 0

Assuming they’re still growing I’d say it was worth it. They make $300m/yr in revenues (NYT) AND Microsoft doesn’t get to own them either. Google has plenty enough cash to not sweat over buying them, and they have the added security that their biggest competitor didn’t acquire them either. Not only that, but Google is, after all, an advertising business. They need all the advertising technology they can get, and for big companies like GOOG and MSFT, it’s usually easier to just pay for the people/technologies than play catch-up and develop in-house.

The reason??

DoubleClick’s chief executive, David Rosenblatt, said a few weeks ago that “—–> a new system

wow, google owns the web advertising world!

This is a stupid deal. Adserving is a commodity business. Adservers are charging $.02 cpms nowadays. Google could have developed a superior adserver product for a tiny fraction of the cost of this acquisition and offered it for free, if the publisher accepted google adsense to run on their remnant inventory, disrupting the entire adserving industry.

Monopoly Mik? Come on, have you ever seen ALL the options for advertising on the internet? The only thing they monopolize is providing the most value for the advertiser. I look forward to this acquisition improving that value.

I think that Google is after DoubleClick’s software that has potential use in offline advertising as well. An area that Google has tried and failed to get into to.

Sounds like a good deal to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxTIV2WcCP0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick

Twenty minutes, huh? And already some geek put it on the wiki.

If Microsoft was interested and they lost it to Google, this is another blow for MS no matter how crazy you think the price is.

This cannot compare to YouTube. One’s a money bleeding machine (YT), surrounded by lawsuits, still figuring out hteir business model, etc. while the other one is a company with solid revenues per year, a technology that goes beyond a neat flash video viewer, just to name a few things.

wow - general rivalry + bid wars = huge payout for DoubleClick! Good for them!

Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com

This just seems like a ridiculous purchase for Google, especially when you consider it’s ALL cash. Deals of this size, even ones substantially smaller, are usually almost all stock. That aside, I still don’t see why Google would want this company. Everyone hates DoubleClick.

It’s Friday the 13th… surely this can’t be good news?

YouTube + DoubleClick is worth the billions. Google now has access to the blue chip advertisers who will spend money to get their brand in front of the YouTube audience.

Google has to be careful not to let their unfriendly tech focused ad staff near the experienced people focused DoubleClick staff. Everyone at the top levels of Google needs to learn how to pay nice with other companies if they want to compete in the “conversation sell” display ad business.

DoubleClick got written about in The Long Tail, its model compared with Google’s AdWords, and not favorably.

Microsoft actually comes out kind of savvy looking, I think, forcing Google to pay that much for something that Google would have killed off eventually anyway if they wanted to.

Ewwww. Did I just say something nice about M$?

Of course, Google Video could have eventually killed off YouTube, so I’m clearly missing something with both deals. It may take a few months or years before we really know what the deal was.

Game over.

Yahoo and Microsoft now have *no* chance to catch Google in online advertising.

I guess the cycle begins anew, and in 10 years someone will dethrone Google.

http://www.dartmotif.com - A DoubleClick owned solution.

DoubleClick was already making strides in monetizing video.

What was the exact amount? If it was for $3.14159265 Billion, that would rock. Too bad it wasn’t for e. Is 2pi next? Or maybe Avogadro’s number.

Well the call just ended at 6:30EST and it was a doozie! Google finally seem to wake up and realize that graphical advertising is the path to full ad world domination. It mainly seemed like screened questions, but overall everyone seemed excited and no one overly concerned about the massive monopolistic play on the entire advertising world by Google. Read more…

Meine Gute!

Don’t understand how Microsoft could lose a CASH bidding battle to Google - not like the stock deal for Youtube, this was straight up $3billion in cash… wow. Bill must’ve forgot the cheque book at home…

Its not that Microsoft couldnt have outbid Google, I think that DoubleClick made a lot of sense with Google because its largest client AOL is also one of the largest clients and partners of Google.

Going with MSFT would have resulted in a potential lose of AOL. So may be they used MSFT to pump their valuation and then let Google do the rest

No mention of DoubleClick publishers huh? Everyone talks about “value to the advertiser!” - but if NYTimes, AOL, Fox Interactive pull out of their Dart deals, guess what? DoubleClick just became worth much less. Why would they pull out? Why wouldn’t they is the question - Google is shaping up to be probably the most serious threat to the advertising ecosystem that exists, from agencies to clients, and I wouldn’t want Google having a soup to nuts window into my advertising revenue stream, from performance based key word stuff to display? Google as the ulitmate gatekeeper for ad dollars? Nope, no thanks.

I think this one has blowback written on it.

To me the most telling part of the deal is that Doubleclick’s investors refused google stock and demanded cash.

This suggests that those “in the know” at Doubleclick believe either that the deal will not reflect favorably on google’s share price, or more likely that google’s share price does not reflect reality.

Consider how easily Google could have, say, offered $4B for the company and payed only a fraction in cash. Odds are this deal was offered and refused by Doubleclick.

$3B in cash and $0 in stock is the COMPROMISE that the two sides came to on the matter.

Brian gets it. Publishers using DFP are key to Doubleclick’s value. Right now, there’s a decent amount of chat about this on a listserv with the 100 or so top ad ops managers in the country. Many online publishers see Google as a competitor. Now, that competitor owns their ad server. There’s enough good competition in the ad server market to make switching a relatively easy option.

A couple of weeks ago, when it was first reported that Microsoft was considering DoubleClick for $2B, people were saying that it was ridiculous and that it would never happen. I new it was not ridiculous but the strategic value to MS because of they distance behind Google in the online advertising world. Google knows how to make money with that acquisition and distances Microsoft and others even more.

Bravo!
Nothing else to say.

That acquisition makes http://www.zebo.com that last large scale independent ad server in the world. Most other ad servers switched to ad network business. I guess ZEDO is next on the acquisition list.

Brian - good post!

In my experience Dart is terrible, terrible, terrible. I’ve got to believe Google could be something far superior for far cheaper and hire one hell of a sales team leveraging the Google name to get the client list that Doubleclick has. This acquisition has to just be to put a pie in Microsoft’s face. I’m actually pulling for MSFT in this war.

be should be build….

Mistake in the URL in the post above: it should be http://www.zedo.com

Brian said it’s a “threat to the advertising ecosystem.”

I recall the recent news about DoubleClick’s Advertising Exchange trial, and Google’s deal to launch the automated system for buying, selling, delivering and measuring television ads on EchoStar DISH Network’s 125 national satellite programming networks — both announced the first week of April.

How will traditional advertising agency executives — with an office full of media buyers — react to the news that the two companies who want to create a fully automated ad auction environment just joined forces?

OK, so maybe it’s a rhetorical question

Perhaps Microsoft and Yahoo! tag teamed to make Google burn its war chest knowing that Google is desperate to diversify its revenue as Microsoft and Yahoo!’s Search technology is quickly coming up to parity and will drastically cut down on Google’s margins going forward.

So Yahoo! bid up YouTube knowing Google is desperate for the money losing sinkhole and Microsoft bid up DCLK.

Bravo Microsoft and Yahoo! You go guys!

$3b in cash… freaking huge!!! Google becoming more and more advertiser than search engine

What will happen next?

Another thing… I had read the title as “Breaking Google”.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the YouTube and DoubleClick acquisitions turn out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. LOL

What’s the valuation of keeping this away from MSFT? high…

and the real winners here are Hellman and Friedman with their 182% IRR and 3x cash-on-cash in 2 years, jesus.

Watch GOOG hit 10+ points Monday morning

Micro$oft could not afford no buying DoubleClick but of course they couldn’t get over the fact that they are not and they won’t any longer be the only company worth a titanic amount of cash. I’m surprised they even made or considered making a 2 billion bid being the cheap company that have always been; always trying to buy companies for a dime after they realize they were not successful at making a copycat of the target acquisition.

Micro$oft is drowning.

Go Go Microsoft “Gadgets”!

Seriously, MSFT wouldn’t know what to do with them. I’m still waiting on Kahuna.

brian, bmof, wilson, and yt all nailed it. agree 100%

another interesting tidbit…..Wenda Millard - current Chief Sales Officer at Yahoo was a co-founder of DCLK back in the day.

do you think yahoo knwos something the others don’t? i’ m specualting here, but its a nice little coincidence nevertheless.

Doubleclick had such a huge advantage because they had a lock on both sides of the business with DFA and DFP. What’s really interesting is that Atlas bought Accipiter a few months ago, bringing the first real competition to that 360-degree publisher-agency combo. The integration has been slow, but money and focus could fix that. A real combined agency/publisher solution would be a huge threat to DoubleClick’s value - particularly if those major DoubleClick publishers started moving away from DFP in a hurry. The agencies would likely follow. If I were in charge of Atlas right now, I’d see this as a huge opportunity and leverage the farm to take advantage of it. Start by making integration hooks with all the existing major ad servers you can find to ease delivery and reporting from Atlas to the publishers….

wow - its a great news. Google is doing revolution.

Mr.Sebastian, I can’t accept that !!!!! Microsoft will never drown. Microsoft is a big fish.

Regards,
RaJ
http://www.suggestusability.com

If Google can do to content ads what they did to search ads, this is great news for publishers.

but now everyone will send their spend to the goog alternatives to avoid feeding the beast and putting themselves at the mercy of an apparent future monopolist. we’ve seen this before - one accretion node gets a little too big, and everyone else takes it a bit on the chin to avoid getting sucked over the event horizon. you’re going to see people talk up inferior alternatives just to stay out of the googlesphere

On the face of it, it looks like the stock market does not like this acquisition.

“But shouldn’t the stock of Google go up if Google is buying a company to become a better advertiser?” someone might be asking themselves.

Well, no. Google is paying $3.1 billion dollars for an asset worth X. If X is worth more than $3.1 billion then the stock should go up. If its worth X then nothing should happen to the stock. And, if its worth less than X (which would mean that there was a premium paid to the target company) then the stock should decline. Well, Google’s stock did decline. $1.65 dollars to be precise if you look at the day plus after-hours trading. This represents a premium of $514 million dollars!

This means that the stock market believes that Google way overpaid. Maybe that’s why Microsoft did not acquire the company… they were smart enough to not overpay. Unfortunately for Google, hubris is lost on those who have too much money to spend.

I find it odd that two giants of the industry –Microsoft & Google– inspire such acrimony or adulation among TechCrunch readers. (At least as evidenced by this forum.) This was a business deal and not a 3.2 Billion dollar FU from Google to Microsoft. I personally doubt that things can be so easily separated into the good guys (Google) and the bad guys (Microsoft). At their size, both companies are a little of each.

Regards,

Chad
http://www.wtfShouldIDo.com

Years from now, we’ll look back and wonder why the heck were we cheering for this monster advertising company who now has the ability to track us everywhere on the Net we might be so strong is its stranglehold on us.

Sometimes getting your competitor to overpay for an asset is the best way to hurt your competitor, even if that asset would have had value to your own company (at the right price). Did Microsoft do that here or did Google beat truly beat them to the punch? Time will tell.

It’s a well-known fact that a lot of companies are threatened by Google’s position in the advertising industry so I would be surprised if Google is able to continue these types of seemingly bold moves indefinitely without facing some counter-moves by other powerful players who want to defend their turf. Given Google’s arrogance these days, I personally don’t think the company’s position is quite as strong as it might appear on the surface.

Agree with Jesse that the true winners in this transaction are the PE firms that took DoubleClick private in 2005.

Thanks Dyson, I was about to say the exact same thing (while trying not to think about the Google AdSense ads on my site)

GJ
http://www.60in3.com

I’m sick of Google. I hope the DoJ antitrust investigates. They scare me now.

It’s a much more safe acquisition than YouTube. It’s like buying a auto factory, whereas buying YouTube was like buying the latest snazzy pick-up truck and keeping your fingers crossed that people still drive them in the future.

I think it’s a smart move. The model that doubleclick has may not merge with google’s but what they have attained is the huge user base and secured it away from competitors.

That’s probably worth the 3billion.

Scott Yates:
Google video was a poor service in comparison to youtube and they weren’t going anywhere near copyright video infringement like youtube did. Also remember the Myspace pass they did and reply with Orkut. They thought they could do better the competition but look at where myspace is now and where orkut is. Perhaps they don’t want to make that same mistake again. Hence the buyout of Youtube and now Doubleclick.

Why compete when you can buyout?

Bad news, because Google has the smarts to make it harder for us to eliminate doubleclick ads.
I see no doubleclick ads when browsing, because my /etc/hosts file contains a lot of entries like:

127.0.0.1 ad.ca.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.de.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net

(I use Linux but I’m sure there are similar things you can do on Windows.)

Here we go again !

This just in…Google pays 3 trillion for “spice” from the planet in Dune

Google video was a poor service in comparison to youtube and they weren’t going anywhere near copyright video infringement like youtube did. Also remember the Myspace pass they did and reply with Orkut. They thought they could do better the competition but look at where myspace is now and where orkut is. Perhaps they don’t want to make that same mistake again. Hence the buyout of Youtube and now Doubleclick.

At least Google acquired someone with real revenue, not the ‘what do we do now?” acquisition of DudTube…I know DC intinately, don’t believe the $300 mm in revenue, more on the $150 mm…Mike, more like a 20 times Revenue deal, and that isn’t healthy, it’s FAT!!

How the private equity firm who owned DC must have smiled, as they ‘pr-ed’ Microsoft interest (who they have past dealings with), scare/excite the Google youngsters, pump up the price and then take them for a ride….and get cash, not GOOG stock…well done!

Then again, when was the last article you read about one of the Top 10 PE firms going under…?

Wait until the analysts dig into the ‘value’ of this acquisition by GOOG.

Yes, it will be harder to block the advertising cookies. The Doubleclick cookies are among the first I add to the blocking list.

There is a new revolutionary ad-system in Scandinavien playing google around. They started 3 months ago and are now serving more than 40 mill ads daily. Guess they are 3 times bigger than google now in Norway. After what I know, they are on its way into the rest of europe in full speed. Watch up, the ad world is changing!

Google will take over the world me thinks

will google buy it? …

Anyone wonder why Microsoft lets these things slip? Yes they get too expensive but still Google always bests MS in these things. There’s the 5% stake in AOL and a bunch of other things. Then this one. Seems like MS, for all its unused stash of billions, could afford to throw bucks on these things but eventually lets Google win each time when they can obviously easily afford bidding far more than that. Maybe it doesn’t make immediate business sense, but the fact that Google “wins” each time is a big factor in letting it look like a winner and MS a lumbering, dying giant.

“Google will take over the world me thinks”

Competitor makes it stronger. It will disintergrate when there is no competitor left.

What I don’t get is why we don’t have any antitrust action against Google… they started out as the underdog and it was great to cheer them on… but now, there is almost no way for someone to succeed in getting into online advertising… when was that last company that got broken up because of antitrust actions? why do we lack this today?

What Scandinavian ad server company is that?

My 247 stock is still *ass*

Antitrust?! Um, learn some law at least in community college like myself before you start asking the gov’t to get involved to help you become more competitive…

WHY CASH AND NOT STOCK?

Here are the reasons Google used cash not stock:

1. In Google’s 3rd quarter earnings call they stated that all future acquisitions would be in cash and that YT was the one time they would use stock.

2. Estimates are that Google has ~$50Billion in its war chest. Spending $3B for a company that has a virtual monopoly on grahpical ads isn’t going to break the company.

A GREAT WIN FOR GOOGLE

Being in this industry for a long time and having performed competitve analysis for one of these online giants, this deal is a huge win for Google. Not only do they control online advertising further, they also now own the new technology DoubleClick is bringing forward to move into offline - a clear stated goal of Google.

POSSIBLE PROBLEMS

The issue I see is what it means to Google as a company in terms of culture and strategy. Google internalizes acquisitions, YT being the exception so far. Will DoubleClick be internalized? How would that work? The companies have two very different cultures and technology processes.

Also, Google has always been against ‘pop up ads’. DoubleClick is king of the pop up. So, now Google is king of the pop up. I necessary evil I guess if you want to rule all of online advertising.

Wait…what happened to “Do not be evil”?

Thanks,
Jaafer
http://digitalu.wordpress.com

I am waiting for the time where google will buy the moon. Seriously, purchase the moon. And have a giant projector that will put advertisements on it so you can see it from earth. Google moon. Think about it brother.

i’m not sure if it’s part of the acquisition but here’s one for all SEM providers: Google now has it’s own SEM service with Performics going head-to-head with other agencies.

It is important to understand why MSFT let Google get this deal.
I think there is a certain kind of thinking that seeps into the ranks of the strategists/decision makers of large, successful, and somewhat mature companies that places too much importance on the “numbers” and “valuation” and “analysis” in deals as opposed to a gut level decision backed by market realities and financial data.

..it will be interesting to see the market reaction to this deal come Monday. my guess is we’re going to seem significant movement in the stock..

Wow, what an amazing amoijnt

Thinking more deeply about Google and Google acquisitions, it seems that Google is putting too many eggs into the same basket. After all, how long is it going to take for the average Joe, to decide that he doesn’t want to be part of the ads game? Today, Web2.0 and Google is the leader of it is depending on advertisement. This model seems to work well, but it has a very significant toll: losing privacy, annoying ads and more than all - losing user focus.

Although TIVO wasn’t that successful, the new struggle of Google will be against the web-TIVO - a way to filter the annoying ads - even though Google might know something about the end user, it will never knows that its ads were filtered (think about small program that filter the html before it has been showed to the end user).

Today ads are very passive for most of us, some are actually clicking them(why is a good question or god question). but they will not last forever. Google can change its simple JavaScript so the average hacker will not be able to make the different between Google and a simple picture. However, this is doom battle for Google like it is a doom battle for the all the companies that are fighting pirate downloads. There only 2 questions here:
1) Are there going to be enough people that will be irritated by the Google dominance and will download this kind of free software (or if MS will decide to get dirty with IE8 or whatever number that will block those ads - mainly JavaScript, etc)
2) Can Google change its ads model to something new… maybe buzzword like web3.0 or semantic web will come to its rescue…
but this is a sinking boat…

What a waste. Google is now a big giant with too much cash and not enough uses for it. Way to waste money.

Does anyone even pay attention to banner ads?

Wow, that’s a lot of money man! but its shitty that now they are in control of most of the advertising online… shame on you Google, shame on you