Web Marketing Strategy Update

Motley Fool: Farewell to DoubleClick

By Rick Aristotle Munarriz (TMF Edible)

The last three million shares of DoubleClick changed hands yesterday, and the acquisition of the digital marketing specialist is now complete. An April offer to take the company private at $8.50 a stub proved to be too tempting for DoubleClick to pass up. It accepted the buyout offer and now it’s publicly traded life is history.

Oh, how it all could have turned out so differently.

DoubleClick was once a giant in online advertising. Its graphical banner ads owned the dot-com landscape. That was before contextual advertising took off. That shift, toward less intrusive, paid-search text ads, meant that portals like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) were running the show.