Google bought Doubleclick for $3.1 billion, which you probably already know. The deal is not really surprising, but it leaves a bitter taste to advertisers, agencies, competitors and the webanalytics industry:
- Doubleclick owns SEO company Performics, which also became a part of Google now.
- Last week Google’s Matt Cutts posted, that he wants users to report paid links in order to keep Google’s index clean. Besides that about 2-3 weeks ago Google announced a CPA/PPA network, which includes links as “creatives”.
- Doubleclick and Google are not the smallest data collectors. Both of them don’t have a clean record when it comes to privacy issues. Wired magazine picked up the story today and more and more people around the world (link is in German) are concerned with their privacy and are ready to take actions (already today Cookie deletion rate in Europe is about 15%)
Overall I believe this deal and recent Google activities and statements are contra-productive for the the entire web and especially the web analytics industry. Some of the issues above can be easily fixed (e.g. Performics), but others don’t bother Google at all (e.g. report of paid links). I am usually a big Google fan hello my friends from the NYC Adwords team but latest developments are just not thoughtful enough for a company called “Godogle”.
