SEO Blog

The last official hurdle to Google’s acquisition of display marketing giant DoubleClick fell today as the European Union approved the $3.1 Billion sale early this morning.

An announcement from Google was issued hours later stating the acquisition has been completed. In a post to the official Google Blog, CEO Eric Schmidt said,

“I’m pleased to share the news that we completed our acquisition of DoubleClick today. Although it’s been nearly a year since we announced our intention to acquire DoubleClick last April, we are no less excited today about the benefits that the combination of our two companies will bring to the online advertising market.

Because we have been waiting for regulatory approval for our acquisition, we’ve been limited by law in the extent to which we could conduct detailed integration planning to map our way forward. That work will begin in earnest now. Although we don’t have detailed plans to announce today, we will communicate regularly with you about our progress in integrating our two companies.

The CBC, Bloomberg and the New York Times are reporting that European regulators are expected to approve Google’s $3.1Billion acquisition of display ad network DoubleClick sometime next week.

EU approval is the final hurdle standing in the way of the buy-out. When completed, Google’s purchase of DoubleClick will mark the biggest buy in Google’s history, nearly doubling the $1.65Billion spent acquiring YouTube.

The deal with also solidify Google as the largest online advertising channel with an estimated 65% of total online ad-spend moving through the Mountain View CA based company. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, amount spent advertising online will approach $50Billion in 2009.

I started compiling links for this piece eight hours two days ago and have since been on a interesting journey through my own memories of 2007. The online marketing industry is in one of its greatest periods of transition as enormous sums of ad-spend pour into the sector looking for places to be spent.

Many small to medium sized search marketing firms catapulted into the big leagues seemingly overnight this year as advertising firms found greater value in online and digital media than in traditional television, print and radio.

The major search engines understand where the money is going. Each acquired its own online advertising network this year in order to contextually serve content-rich advertising across as many subscribing websites as possible. The moment Google initiated the slow process of spending $3.1billion to buy DoubleClick, Yahoo and MSN had to have ad-networks too. Not having one would be like not having a paid-search advertising platform…

2007 was also the year of the Facebook. Perhaps the fastest growing social network in 2007, Facebook received a great deal of attention in the mainstream media and from online marketers. Adding two or three hundred thousands new users per month, Facebook ranks among the most popular networks online. The company faced a setback late in the year when privacy concerns forced it to withdraw and redesign its social advertising platform, Facebook Beacon.

If you’re reading these words in Canada, I can only guarantee that they were true to my writing as I typed them. Chances are nothing has changed but for the record, if you are reading these words in my home and native land, I can no longer pass any assurance to you whatsoever that the site I write to is exactly the same as the site you are viewing. Huh?

Earlier this week, Canada’s largest high-speed Internet Service Provider, Rogers Communications, began an experiment in which the company hijacks and alters other websites in order to deliver messages through its new Internet Subscriber Notification Service. In the specific case mentioned at Net Neutrality expert Lauren Weinstein’s blog, the familiar Google homepage was altered to add a message from Rogers which was sponsored by their corporate search partner Yahoo!

Using deep packet inspection technology, Rogers monitors every page delivered to its clients with the ability to insert its messages into the content stream when it feels it necessary. The messages note when each client is passing the 75% mark of the monthly bandwidth caps Rogers applies to client accounts.