Google Buying Power

In April Google announced that they are buying DoubleClick a leading company in the ad serving business.  Their reason behind the purchase is that Google and DoubleClick play different roles in online advertising. DoubleClick gives advertisers/agencies the tools to plan and deliver their online banner/video campaign. To make a long story short basically by combining Google’s infrastructure with DoubleClick knowledge they will be able to deliver the next generation of innovative ads significantly improving the overall effectiveness of online advertising.

• Double Click (3.1 Billion)
• Youtube (1.65 Billion)
• Feedburner (100 Million)
• Blogger –Pyra Labs
• Measuremap (???)
• Peakstream (???)
• Jotspot (???)
• Greenborder (???)

Google’s continued buying power is as always causing conflict in the world.  It seems this time that they have upset the EU with the DoubleClick purchase and they want to put a stop to it.  According to NYTimes.com Europe’s major consumer group BEUC said on the 4th of July 2007 that they feared the Internet search engine company Google takeover of DoubleClick would damage EU privacy rights and limit consumers’ choice of Web content.

What is coming into play with this purchase is the concern of a “Monopoly” of online advertising.  The fear is that Google will be vertically leveraged with its keyword search ads, Youtube videos and then with DoubleClick’s leadership of banner/video display ads they will leave consumers with no real ability of chose other that those served by Google.

At present Google has 90 percent share of the German, Spain, France and Britain search market.  So basically this type of market power could have a negative impact on diversity on the net.

The funny thing about all of this is Google is actually in a bidding war against Microsoft so what does it really matter who buys it - either the Monopoly software company or the Monoply search engine company!

–if you know the purchase prices of those other companies let me know.