And the deals just keep on coming... Having supposedly lost out in the bidding for both DoubleClick and 24/7 Real Media, Microsoft has agreed to acquire aQuantive for a cool $6bn, which represents a massive 85% premium to its Thursday closing price. That's roughtly 12x 2006 revenues or 60x EBITDA.
This deal basically completes the elimination of independent ad-serving technologies with any market share. Ad serving on the Internet is now controlled by Microsoft (Atlas), Google (Dart) and AOL (Ad-Tech). It also brings Microsoft further into the digital marketing and advertising world than it perhaps wanted. aQantive includes several digital marketing agencies (Avenue A, Razorfish, DNA), as well as two performance-based advertising networks, DrivePM and MediaBrokers in the UK.
The consolidation continues...
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