Google Plans To Sell Part of DoubleClick

mudimba writes "Google has announced that they will be selling the search engine marketing branch of recently acquired company DoubleClick. Google's reason for the sale is that they do not want to appear to be giving preferential treatment in search rankings to DoubleClick customers. Tom Phillips, director of Google's integration with DoubleClick, said, 'Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google's mission and core to the trust we ask from our users.' Google was under scrutiny from the European Union and the FTC over their purchase of DoubleClick, but both eventually approved the deal."

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[Anonymous Coward]

Google are also planning to cut hundreds of jobs at doubeclick

Re:What does DoubleClick do?

[Jellybob]

Their main business model is selling ad space on people's websites - find advertisers can be incredibly hard work, so a lot of sites outsource that to Double Click.

They then sell the advertising space, and provide web apps that allow the advertisers to see how effective the campaign is, and site owners to see who's buying their ad space, and how much they're paying.

That's also the reason there was so much scrutiny of this deal, since the largest banner advertising company has now been bought by the largest text advertising company.

Re:What does DoubleClick do?

[Blakey Rat]

Since I worked for a competition, I feel compelled to mention: DoubleClick may, or may not, be the largest banner advertising company on the web. They're definitely in the top three, but this isn't an industry that actually has metrics to determine who the "leader" is, like most industries do, and DoubleClick (and the other two big players in this field) don't share enough data to really determine this.

DoubleClick is certainly the most visible to the public, though.