Google Buys Doubleclick

Goog, as though looking to disprove once again the notion that they only do small purchases, has dropped another bomb on the biz-tech world. This time, we're talking about yesterday's announcement that Sergey and Larry are buying DoubleClick for $3.1B.

Some thoughts:

• DoubleClick is probably the major player in the CPM/ad serving space. Watching it getting gobbled up by Google is kind of like watching a whale swallow up a somewhat smaller whale.
  
• The deal is a whopper any which way you look at it. Goog is paying out $3.1 billion in cash for a company that two years ago was taken private for $1.1 billion and which had revenues of $300M last year. Either way, this is a huge premium, especially for a mature company like DoubleClick.
  
• I think by now we can all stop thinking about Google as a search engine company and start thinking about it as the world's biggest advertising machine. Google is king of the CPC/text ads space; acquiring DoubleClick gives them a huge presence in the CPM space assuming that they manage to digest the new company without cannibalizing their existing revenue streams
  
• The mega-valuation came about in part because Microsoft was also looking to buy DoubleClick. Google was able to outspend Gates & Co big time. Which means that Google has now officially taken over the title of the Borg of the new millenium.