DoubleClick On The Blocks?

A reader writes: "Many sources report that DoubleClick - the world's leading supplier of cookies - may be up for sale. " There's also an AP report out as well. The online advertising market has been hard lately - but there's also been a widespread perception that DoubleClick has been resting on their laurels.

Comments

One of many options

[fembots]

DoubleClick hired a financial adviser to study options including a sale of part or all of its businesses, a recapitalization, an extraordinary dividend, a share repurchase or a spinoff, pretty much the same thing any company will do, especially when its earnings are better than expected.

Its 3rd-quarter earnings was $15million, up from $6.3million last year, and fourth-quarter forecast is $72 million. So I don't think DoubleClick is going through a rough patch.

Re:One of many options

[jfengel]

In fact, with more cash than debt, and a price-to-earnings ratio of 31, that's actually not an entirely bad bet. Buy a share of DCLK for $7.20 and you're buying $4.50 in book value and perhaps $.25 a year in earnings.

I wouldn't buy it since I don't invest in companies I don't like, but purely on the basis of the numbers this is a solvent and profitable company. I don't think that their earnings are likely to increase enough to justify the P/E of 30, because I think that more Firefox and less IE will decrease their revenue. But this is hardly a fire sale.

127.0.0.1 doubleclick.*

[Underholdning]

Doubleclick was the very first host I mapped to 127.0.0.1 in my host file when web ads started to appear. I wonder how many people actully did that? I know that most of my co workers did it - even those that didn't know what it meant.
" It also lowered its fourth-quarter earnings forecast to $72 million to $77 million"
Obviously, not many, since they can make that kind of money.

Re:127.0.0.1 doubleclick.*

[thedillybar]

>Doubleclick was the very first host I mapped to 127.0.0.1

What about those damned websites that won't let you "Continue" until all the ads on the page have loaded (e.g. javascript)? I used the hosts file for a while; when this became an issue I switched to Firefox's Adblock Extension.

I block double-click because...

[Air-conditioned cowh]

It's just sooooo sllllloooowwwww.

Any page with doubleclick ads on it seems to get held up waiting for doubleclick's servers to do anything.

The words "Waiting for... blah.blah.doubleclick.blah" or similar used to be old friends, until I discovered the hosts file :)

Re:AdBlock

[Threni]

> DoubleClick, you can't pass my Firefox's AdBlock! No clicks for you.
> Muuuuhahhahahahha!

Actually, I rather like clicking on ads then just closing down the window or hitting `back`. Perhaps AdBlock could be modded to click on the ads a few times in the background?

Re:Double Click is a dinosaur

[Whammy666]

What I did at work (before firefox) was to set up the Squid proxy server so that whenever it got a request for a doubleclick banner, it would redirect the request to the local web server which would return a blank banner. Worked liked a charm.

Re:AdBlock

[Anonymous Coward]

The adblocking css technique can be used to block Google ads pretty easily.

Might be bying, but is was doing business

[FerretFrottage]

My cousin is a salemen for doubleclick (hey don't DoS me, I'm just passing on some info). When he took the job, I told him he was working for one of the top ten internet public enemies, but sales are his thing and doubleclick did generate sales. I don't recall thhe exact figures he quoted me a few months back, but the number of doubleclick related ads on the web was well into the billions (not hard to believe) so even relatively few sales generated via doubleclick translated into $$$ for them.

Re:127.0.0.1 doubleclick.*

[Zocalo]

But even then, think about it: each time you hit a page with a link to some doubleclick url, you end up hitting port 80 of your own machine

Which is why the smarter ones amongst us mapped it (and numerous others) to 0.0.0.0 instead. I've yet to find a single IP stack where that isn't the network equivalent of /dev/null.

Re:Do you all want to go to paid sites instead?

[kirk444]

But I have DVR on my tv. I don't watch the commercials anymore. As long as the majority of people keep watching them, those of us smart enough (or sneaky enough?) to find ways around watching them will benefit from the blind stupidity of the masses. Oh, and for those of you using firefox who haven't checked out the "Adblock" extension, you should, immediately.

Re:outrageous expiration date cookies

[evilmrhenry]

Either that or simply allow the user to set a maximum cookie retention time. What I'd REALLY like is a browser that doesn't save cookies for sites I haven't bookmarked, or combine the ideas- cookies for sites not bookmarked aren't saved very long.

Mozilla already lets you set a max lifetime for cookies. (Mine is set at two weeks.) However, the link to the bookmarks idea is even better.

0.0.0.0

[Jayfar]

Which is why the smarter ones amongst us mapped it (and numerous others) to 0.0.0.0 instead. I've yet to find a single IP stack where that isn't the network equivalent of /dev/null.

Except for a tcp stack derived from an ancient BSD that instead uses 0.0.0.0 as the broadcast address.

http://www.kbalertz.com/kb_108783.aspx

Re:Firefox

[igrp]

I do something similar. I use Firefox's Cookieculler extension.

It basically allows you to mark certain cookies as "protected". Now, if you don't want to keep track of what cookies you need (ie. you expect your browser to handle the cookie management instead of doing it yourself), you just set those few cookies that you need (in my case that's Gmail, Ebay, Slashdot, Amazon and a select few semi-trusted sites) as "protected". Then you enable cookies. At the end of the day, you pull up the Cookieculler dialog, select the "don't allow sites that set removed cookies to set future cookies" option, select all cookies and hit delete. Cookieculler automatically makes sure that you don't accidently delete any important cookie and won't ever be bothered by a website that requires cookies to access the site.

Of course, this doesn't really solve the problem which is the cookie system itself but it addresses the issue of end users just clicking "yes" because they don't want to be bothered. And since you checked the "don't allow sites that set removed cookies to set future cookies" option, you're basically compiling a blacklist without any hassle at all.

Re:Why?

[abandonment]

because the more cookies you have - particularly from the larger ad networks like doubleclick - the easier it is to track you - across dozens and dozens of sites - and all of the invasions of privacy that go along with them.

it's not about the filesize - it's about the information contained in those cookies.

Re:My personal experiences with DoubleClick

[Anonymous Coward]

I had no experience with the marketing side, but yes, Doubleclick was always global in scope...they had (still have?) these big orientation meetings where they'd fly in all the new hires for a week of all things Doubleclick (this was late 1990s). I remember they flew in guys from Sydney and Frankfurt...they always tried to be the worldwide ad provider.

There were several attempts at the holy grail, including some pure-statistical systems. Everyone believed that the perfect system was just a version or two away. In the end, what it came down to was that it wasn't worth it ... the bubble had burst, and you could buy a million impressions for ten bucks versus more targeted advertising which was much more pricey. Guess which was the more popular choice.

I haven't been there for a long time now, but I know it was very much in maintenance mode...they still do targeted advertising (like at /., for example), but I don't know if they ever got anything more sophisticated in place.