Google bought Doubleclick last week for $3.1bn. There’s a lot of commentary on why they did this. It’s a great deal of money, Doubleclick has had its ups and downs over the years, and it’s an interesting topic for discussion, so I thought I’d kick off the discussion here.
My thoughts today are:
- Doubleclick have lots of really good agency, advertiser and publisher relationships. Google don’t get on too well with some agencies (at least in the UK – is it the same elsewhere?) and may want to disintermediate (i.e. cut out of the loop) agencies by building more direct advertiser relationships. Google bought Doubleclick’s relationships.
- Google do direct response, pay-per-click, text ads on their own sites really well, but some of their experiments with other advertising strategies are far less successful. Doubleclick has great technology for delivering rich, branded advertising units across a huge range of publisher websites. They complement each other.
- Building on the previous point, Google wanted to diversify. It’s revenue all comes from one source at the moment. Now it has another one, which minimises risk, in the eyes of investors, should there be a downturn in PPC linked to search.
One thing that’s important to remember is that Doubleclick doesn’t really have any ad inventory of its own: it’s a channel (technology and account teams, contracts and relationships) for lots of advertising, but it sold its own ad network a long time ago, so Google wasn’t buying that.
Thoughts?
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