First heard this via the fastest newswire in the business, otherwise known as Robert Scoble’s Twitter feed: Google is buying DoubleClick for $3.1-billion (the New York Times has a story here, TechCrunch has it here and Om has it here. As reported in various places, the search engine was widely rumoured to be looking at buying the ad network, and was reportedly vying with Microsoft for the right to walk down the aisle with DoubleClick. Happiest player in this deal? The company that bought DoubleClick for $1.1-billion about two years ago and then sold off some assets for about $500-million.
For those keeping score at home, the price is about 10 times estimated revenue for this year. The NYT story quotes an analyst saying: “Keeping Microsoft away from DoubleClick is worth billions to Google.†Worth almost twice what it paid for YouTube, apparently. I’ll bet it didn’t take the company any Monte Carlo analysis to figure out it needed to keep it away from Mister Softee. Google describes its rationale for the deal in a press release on the Google site.