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.

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.

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.

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.