Following Up on GoogleClick
9:16 am April 2nd, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
Over at Valleywag there is a good post on the ongoing Google/DoubleClick situation. This is something that has caught the attention of more than a few media outlets, but has not gotten as much attention as it otherwise would due to the coverage of Apple/EMI’s anti-DRM deal, Kathy Sierra (WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show covered it today), and all the April Fool’s Day nonsense.
So, why would Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick make a difference? The New York advertising group runs the platform, DART, which many publishers use to host the ads they sell directly. It’s a system which allows ad sales departments to set the order in which different campaigns run, cap the frequency with which an ad is shown, and squeeze more revenue from a particular slot.
If you don’t really follow how internet advertising works, this may not seem like a big deal, but trust me, it is. Once you get past just displaying Google Adsense, online advertising can get tricky because there is a lot of control as far as frequency, targeting, tracking, and serving third-party advertisements (often with complex code of their own). Google plus DoubleClick would be basically have some of the same implications for online advertising controls as what happened when Google bought Urchin. Basically something powerful and expensive can become free and probably easy to use. The situations are not exactly the same, but they do parallel one another.
A number of blogs have stressed Microsoft’s role in this, in that DoubleClick would be an ideal target for a Microsoft take over. Some have gone so far as to say that it is their last chance to follow through on their internet advertising goals and not simply give up. While this is oversimplifying things, DoubleClick is asuccessful, turnkey operation that would be a great asset for either taker.
As an online publisher I am pulling for Google here as they have done a great job with their other services and, from what I can tell, the other companies that they have gobbled up. I would love to see an easy-to-use, quick-to-implement version of something like PHPadsNew (OpenAds) that someone else will pretty much setup and maintain for me. I am not excited about the type of information I would be giving out or the control I would be giving up, but if you are already using Google Analytics this such not be a big deal. Plus the chance of integration with Google Analytics could be incredible.
