Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

There’s more money going into the online advertising  sector again, with the announcement this morning that Specific Media has raised an astounding $100M to invest in mergers and acquisitions.  This space is hopping. Some local companies recently in the news in the sector: Santa Monica’s The Rubicon Project recently raised $6M in October from Clearstone for their online ad optimization software; Los Angeles-based Gorilla Nation, which reps advertising for online sites grabbed $50M in a round in May; Spot Runner raised $32M in August; and Santa Barbara’s AdECN was acquired by Microsoft in July. Not to mention, a continual swirl of rumors around whether or not ValueClick is or is not the target of acquisition.

I was sitting at a lunch the other day at a conference with David Moore, Chairman of 24/7 Real Media (which was recently acquired by advertising giant WPP for $649M) and were were talking about this, and I asked him when the merger/acquisition frenzy in the Internet advertising market was going to end. He told me that right now it’s a giant game of “whack-a-mole” — everywhere you look, a new Internet advertising firm pops up, and then some player in the industry will buy them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 8:55 am and is filed under Mergers and Acquisitions, Venture Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.