With click throughs on AdSense possibly dropping, Google is looking to finally acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion as European regulators will most probably dismiss Anti - trust claims filed by Microsoft which has claimed that the deal would hurt competition in the online advertising market. 

Microsoft bought DoubleClick rival AQuantive Inc. for $6 billion last year. Microsoft’s concern with the deal stems from the fact that if the acquisition goes through, about 80% of ads on third party sites will be through one conglomerate - Google. This is slightly different from traditional media where media buying and planning companies are distributed across 4 conglomerates. 

Google was dependent on sponsored links — text ads that run alongside search results — for most of its $16.6 billion in 2007 sales. It is now looking to grow that pie with consistent demands on it’s stock. The company’s shares have fallen 40 percent from their high of $747.24 on Nov. 7 on investor concern that fewer users are clicking on its Internet ads.

DoubleClick’s products help advertisers measure how effective their ads are and allow Web publishers to track and manage online advertising. They deal mostly with Rich Media Placements and Display related placement as opposed to Google’s primarily text based placements.

Microsoft is also probably crying foul because its acquisition of Yahoo! hasn’t gone through. If the Microsoft Yahoo! acquisition had gone through, Microsoft would probably have created the World’s leading Display Ad Company and this would have saved them a few years and billions of dollars in terms of development.

The EU’s Regulators must submit their decision by April 2. 

It must be noted that the legal tangles have taken almost a year for the acquisition to go through. Google settled on the amount last year in April. You can have a look at the original article we wrote here.  

Bookmark this post to: