April 13th saw Google finalise a deal to acquire online media and advertising heavy weight DoubleClick Inc. The announcement from Google states that they’ve purchased DoubleClick for USD$3.1 billion in cash from San Francisco based private equity firm Hellman & Friedman along with JMI Equity.
The interesting thing here isn’t that Google have purchased yet another monster business but that they are one of the biggest forces in the online advertising landscape. DoubleClick currently service a different type of online advertising client than Google, so the DoubleClick business will definitely complement Google’s online advertising strategies. More importantly though, Google gain all of the technology that DoubleClick have been developing which focuses strongly around rich media advertising. I expect it won’t be long before we see Google start to aggressively roll out rich media advertising into their current products such as Google Video and YouTube and subsequently into the wider market as well.
Interesting times ahead for online advertisers, the internet landscape is changing yet again.
