This is so last year but if you don’t know what Google is up to, you can check this out.
Google wants to buy DoubleClick. For your information, DoubleClick is currently owned and bought by a private equity firm Hellman & Friedman back in July 2005. Coincidentally, the engineering firm that I’m currently working in was acquired by the same private equity as well. Whoever these guys are, they sure made some good investments and returns for their owners and shareholders. Google is going to pay Hellman & Friedman handsomely just to own DoubleClick.
This deal actually trigger lots of discussions and objections especially from portals and competitors such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and ad agencies. Microsoft offer to acquire Yahoo can be seen as a counter strategy from Microsoft to counter Google from being the main player in the online advertising marketplace.
To get you to the meat of the story, here are the reasons why google is buying:
– DoubleClick’s products and technology are complementary to our search and and content-based text advertising business, and give us new opportunities to improve online advertising for consumers, advertisers and publishers.
– Historically, we’ve not allowed third parties to serve into Google’s AdSense network, which has made it hard for advertisers to get performance metrics. Together, Google and DoubleClick can deliver a more open platform for advertisers, and provide the metrics they need to manage marketing campaigns.
– By combining Google’s infrastructure with DoubleClick’s knowledge of agencies and publishers, we can create the next generation of more innovative ad serving technology, one that significantly improves the efficiency and effectiveness of online advertising.
– To manage ad inventory, some of the largest publishers use DoubleClick DART for Publishers – but a good portion of it goes unsold. It’s our view that the combination of DoubleClick and Google will help these publishers succeed by monetizing their unsold inventory.
More on the news of Google acquiring DoubleClick here
If you are using a email address other than one provided by gmail (Google’s flavor of email system similar to Yahoo! Mail and Live/Hotmail) to login into Google Adsense, the system will now ask you to switch to a google account. 
