Google: America’s biggest ad agency

By Justin Fox | April 13, 2007 | +

So Google is buying Doubleclick. From CNNMoney:

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

Google (Charts) 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.

Makes sense, I guess. Google dominates text-based advertising on the Web. Now it’s going for the display side of things. But I do wonder if, as the company gets ever farther away from its original focus on helping Web users find things and becomes an established, even dominant player in the advertising industry, if it will inevitably lose its edge in search. Not that there’s any sign of that happening yet, of course.

Related Topics: Economy & Policy

@TIMEBusiness

Latest on Business

Facebook May 16, 2012

Facebook IPO: What You Need To Know Now

[The article was updated at 12:20 pm on 5/16/12.]

Prom night is almost here for Facebook and its suitors. Here’s a program to the biggest high technology initial public offering ever, and what you should know:
From our Partners
America’s War on TouristsSlate

War of the Roses: Mother's Day Bouquet Is an Economic and Political BattlefieldDaily Finance
Half Of Recent College Graduates Lack Full-Time Job, Study SaysHuff Post Business
Europe May 16, 2012

Spain’s Prime Minister Warns Country Is in Danger of Being Shut Out of Markets

MADRID — Spain‘s prime minister warned Wednesday that the country faced the danger of being locked out of international markets as investors continued to fret about the future of the euro and Greece’s place in the 17-country eurozone.

“Right now there is a serious risk that (investors) will not lend us money or they will do so at an astronomical rate,” Mariano Rajoy told Spanish lawmakers.

paul_lukasiak

I don’t think google cares all that much whether its search engine maintains its dominant status in the market — that’s the whole point.
At some point “Google-bomb” is going to get a whole new definition.

I expect Google to collapse at some point — they are leveraging funny money (the grossly exaggerated expectations of long-term profitability of their assets in a highly volatile marketplace) to acquire other internet-based properties at “funny money market” prices.

Google’s value is vulnerable not only to loss of market share to loss of a dominant position to whoever comes up with “the next big thing”, its also vulnerable to lots of small time entrepreneurs who can do exactly what double-click does, but cheaper and on a smaller scale.
Dad

All I know is that Doubleclick is the premier source of spyware on my computer.
Anonymous

bah
http://macography.net/2011/10/how-to-migrate-from-gmail-to-icloud/ How to migrate from Gmail to iCloud

[...] with privacy that Google services pose. As much I like Google services, that company remains one of the biggest advertising agency in the US. They don’t have products to sell beside ads. All services that we get for free creates an [...]