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Google buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion
marvinalone writes "The New York Times reports that Google has purchased DoubleClick. That seems to be the conclusion to the speculation we've talked about earlier. From the article: 'Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, the online advertising company, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies announced, an amount that was almost double the $1.65 billion in stock that Google paid for YouTube late last year.'"
Doubleclick is still blocked in every way, shape, and form available on my browser.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
I sincerely hope Google will simply replace all DoubleClick-crippled sites with AdSense. DoubleClick's tracking cookies are the reason I block web ads.
Hate them now. Use their products if you want, but hate them anyway.
v e_tech/article.php/3395571] article has some interesting comments on the matter of fraud.
Seriously though, Google doesn't have a monopoly on on-line text advertising (even pay per-click), Yahoo has got into that business (formally Overture)[http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com] and I'm sure other companies have as well. This [http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/columns/executi
And there are still heaps of other advertisers out their, and you know what, I block almost all of them (Adblock and NoScript, 'tis great). (For most sites, it is seriously, if they can't cope without my viewing their ads (even if I'm never going to ever buy anything), then I guess I can do without them. For sites like this, I like to think that I am helping to contribute to more people coming here by having insightful and interesting comments. After all, that is what gets the people looking at the site, and thus the ads.)
I wank in the shower.
Heh, Microsoft should be concerned with Google; they're everywhere that Microsoft wants to go, and if you don't keep moving as a corporation, you lose investors.
When I saw this headline, all I could think was "Google buys up another chunk of the internet." Seriously -- DoubleClick is everywhere. It's almost like google's trying to become the web.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
This may have been part of a strategy to make sure that nobody else bought DoubleClick first. The last thing Google wants is for Microsoft to try to take over their most profitable field. Even if Google never touches DoubleClick's materials after this, they don't have to worry about someone else having that "advantage" over Google.
Although I also wandered what Google was getting itself into buying a company that notoriously places tracking cookies on computers everywhere, I can see what they're trying to do. I only hope that Google will clean them up instead of Doubleclick dirtying Google. They should stop putting tracking cookies on people's computers, remove any tracking cookies already on the computer, and deny any overly flashy banner ads. That would strongly increase Google's credibility and help eliminate some of the garbage on the Internet.
Hydraulic pizza oven!! Guided missile! Herring sandwich! Styrofoam! Jayne Mansfield! Aluminum siding! Borax!
A good point, if poorly executed.
The cynic in me is wondering: What if this was a Microsoft ploy. Everyone said Google was bidding to drive the price up for MS... what if MS was only feigning interest so that google would drop 3 Gigabills on something that is pretty much blocked to hell and back by anyone with clue.
The Official FAQ for the announcement claims that they did this because "Our goal is to make advertising on the internet work better: better for users with less intrusive ads and better privacy protection, better for advertisers with greater accountability and effectiveness, and better for publishers with improved monetization and cleaner site integration." In other words, they thought DoubleClick was intrusive, but they're too nice to say it.
I don't know anyone who doesn't block doubleclick.
I always thought the name of the game was to keep your focus
and not dilute your efforts. And as far as I can tell,
the only reason Google is everywhere that Microsoft wants to
go is because they see what Google does, and want to emulate
that. That is reactive, and seems like a sure way to lose
your way. I dont like Microsoft much as a company, but
in the past you had to give them credit for not losing
focus. They kept after things they started until they got
it basically usable, and mostly solid. And did a better
job of that than many other companies. Microsoft should
be concerned with finding the ( lawful ) strategies and
tactics that get them where they want to be, and stop letting
other companies define so much of thier roadmap.
emt 377 emt 4
..."Advertise no evil"
Hope so. But then again, I hope for world peace as well.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
You post on Slashdot so you probably don't know too many people in the first place :-P
In reality though, I know a lot of people who didn't even have a pop-up blocker until it was finally added to Internet Explorer. Blocking ads on web pages? I don't know a single non-geek who has an adblocker installed. If they're not interested, they just ignore them.
Pretty soon yahoo and such will move from storing their ads on ads.yahoo/com/ad/ad.jpg to yahoo.com/$RANDOMSTRING.jpg. That way you won't be able to block them using filters unless you also want to block all images from that site. Which would be kind of annoying, especially if they stored their email interface graphics in the same format.
Hasn't happened yet though... six years ago when I started blocking ads I thought it would become inevitable.
I'm a geek, nerd, whatever.
... yourself...
I don't block ads. If a site is an Ad farm, I won't go there, period.
If a site has one or two ads that I can tolerate, that's cool.
I do block popups though, if you can't present your content with the window that "I" allowed for you to create on my desktop, you can go
There are good blogs (term, ugh) out there who solely rely on ads to maintain their blog, think about what "you" are doing to them by blocking the ads.
I hate flashy annoying advertisements as much as the next guy, but the way I think of it is that it's up to the people behind the website to control how much crap they put on their page. If we (me and the web site owners) don't agree on the quantity, I close my browser window (deal is off)..
Are you shitting me? Google's tracking is far more nefarious. I quote another post from this thread by an Anonymous Coward:
Google ad sense operates on a different level...using cookies is just part of the game. Via IP pingbacks, toolbar tracking, and account identification, users may unkowningly be giving out alot more data than they realize.
Say for instance that you use Gmail. or any Google service that requires login. Google can track you via that login to each site you visit that has a google ad (70% of the net from what I understand). See, doubleclick never had this part of the equation...they never had account info. Google can tie your IPs, usernames, email content, and web browsing activity...and you can't do jack about it (short of blocking the google scripts themselves). Even without login account info, Google has the ability to track your individual machine via IP pingbacks. If you nav to page one, the google ad gets your exposed ip, then the next page you visit that has a google ad...yep..that ip is used to track that navigation. No cookie needed. Of course, if your behind a firewall, only the firewall ip would get exposed. But still...do you really want to give anyone that much information about you?
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
You could be wrong.
It's not offbase to ask the person who sneers at "do no evil" to think about their own standards. Are your principles just PR because you've had to make difficult moral decisions, or even evil decisions? Does being a corporation imply that Google must be full of it, while you should be forgiven?
"Do no evil" is an impossibly high bar that Google has chosen to be accountable to. When they screw up, they get to hear about it from cynics like you, who pretend to see the world through black-and-white glasses, and pretend that the moral sense is absolute and good and evil are obvious. As five seconds reading the two brains thing should convince you, there's no pony in seeing the world this way (here's a link, by the way).
I don't work for Google. The nerve you hit, I guess, is the one that can't bear to see idealism being trashed for no reason. In the world we do have, hope for something better is all we've got. If corporate accountability is it, so be it.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.