Google Buys DoubleCkick for $3.1 Billion - All Your Ads Are Belong to Us

According to a Google press release, Google has acquired DoubleClick, provider of ad metrics and digital marketing technology, for the princely sum of $3.1 billion.

What the release says: "The acquisition will combine DoubleClick's expertise in ad management technology for media buyers and sellers with Google's leading advertising platform and publisher monetization services.

The combination of Google and DoubleClick will offer superior tools for targeting, serving and analyzing online ads of all types, significantly benefiting customers and consumers."

What the release means, "All your ads are belong to us." (via Steve Rubel twitter post)

What it also does is impose the cost per thousand metric model on virtually all Internet advertising. Blog advertising via Blogads is sold by the week, month, quarter. Doubleclick and other blog ad networks charge a more traditional cost per thousand.

Problem: for blog advertising, the traditional model does not take into account the essence of blogs, which is influence. Sometimes, a blog with a small number of readers, and therefore not many thousands of impressions to sell, is actually more influential than a blog with more readers.

I have seen this repeatedly in the high-yield, cost-effective blog advertising I have placed for clients including Cendant, American Greetings and Simon & Schuster.

It is likely, therefore, to be a bumpy road for blog advertising in the short run, yet to offer even better ROI for blog advertisers. Stay tuned.

That line from Rubel is priceless. I laughed my ass off.

BL,
"Sometimes, a blog with a small number of readers...is actually more influential than a blog with more readers." Other than the obvious vertical marketing which has applied to trade pubs as long as they have existed. And now applies to Blogs and all manner of specialty web sites, I don't see how that can apply. Can you enlighten me?

Chris

Tell you what, Chris, I'll write more about this over the next week or so. I want to do some interviews and include some numbers based on campaigns I have done for clients.

One quick example, one of the smaller blogs I bought for the Karen Quinn Wife in the Fast Lane campaign, for just $40 a week, sent us a significant amount of traffic because its audience holds the writer in such high regard.