{"id":1317,"date":"2007-05-18T10:46:10","date_gmt":"2007-05-18T14:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/05\/18\/online-ad-business-drowing-in-cash\/"},"modified":"2007-05-18T10:46:10","modified_gmt":"2007-05-18T14:46:10","slug":"online-ad-business-drowning-in-cash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/05\/18\/online-ad-business-drowning-in-cash\/","title":{"rendered":"Online ad business drowning in cash"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" class=\"left\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-content\/uploads\/tvadvertising.jpg?w=525\" alt='tvadvertising.jpg' \/>So Microsoft <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/presspass\/press\/2007\/may07\/05-18Advertising.mspx\">is buying aQuantive<\/a>, an online ad company, for $6-billion in its largest acquisition to date &#8212; the largest since the $1.4-billion purchase of Great Plains Software in 2001, as far as I can tell. Is aQuantive, which I had never heard of until this morning, worth twice as much as Google paid for Doubleclick not too long ago? Hard to say. Paying <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2007\/05\/18\/microsoft-pays-6-billion-for-aquantive\/\">twice a company&#8217;s market cap<\/a> is pretty huge. Obviously, the beast from Redmond can afford it, since it probably generates $6-billion in free cash flow every couple of months. But does this remind anyone of the big optical-networking acquisition frenzy of the late 1990s, with Nortel and JDS Uniphase and that whole crew? Just asking.<\/p>\n<p><b>Update:<\/b><\/p>\n<p>ZDNet has <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.zdnet.com\/BTL\/?p=5086\">some background<\/a> on aQuantive, in which the only name I recognize is Razorfish, a legendary money-sucking dot-com bubble company that eventually got acquired after the bubble popped. Just for the record, the company&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/finance.google.com\/finance?q=AQNT\">revenue last year<\/a> was $442-million, which makes Microsoft&#8217;s bid almost 14 times revenue. My friend Paul Kedrosky warns of the <a href=\"http:\/\/paul.kedrosky.com\/archives\/2007\/05\/18\/microsofts_aqua.html\">dreaded &#8220;winner&#8217;s curse&#8221;<\/a> that often comes into play in auction-style scenarios. And Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, who knows a thing or two about online advertising, argues that aQuantive is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.watchmojo.com\/web\/blog\/?p=1571\">well worth twice<\/a> what Google paid for Doubleclick.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So Microsoft is buying aQuantive, an online ad company, for $6-billion in its largest acquisition to date &#8212; the largest since the $1.4-billion purchase of Great Plains Software in 2001, as far as I can tell. Is aQuantive, which I had never heard of until this morning, worth twice as much as Google paid for &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/05\/18\/online-ad-business-drowning-in-cash\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Online ad business drowning in cash&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}