AdAge released a list of media acquisitions in 2006, and Google is featured no less than three times.[1]
- YouTube by Google, $1.65B
- Massive by Microsoft, $200M – $400M
- Atom Films by Viacom, $200M
- DMarc by Google, $102M
- Xfire by Viacom, $102M
- Platform by Comcast, $80M
- Grouper by Sony, $65M
- JotSpot by Google, $50M
- Petfinder by Animal Planet, $35M
- Wired.com by Conde Nast, $25M
Look at that YouTube acquisition price compared with the others. Online video advertising this year alone is expected to be $410 million, an 82.2 percent gain over last year’s $225 million figure, according to eMarketer. The market is expected to be worth $3 billion by 2010. Well, unless you believe Mark Cuban, who is convinced that online video advertising will collapse.
Now look at in-game advertising, where the second acquisition, Massive, comes into play. If you believe the Yankee Group, that market is expected to be $732 million by 2010. If you believe Microsoft’s internal estimates, the figure is closer to $1 billion.
[1] The list is handy, but for some reason AdAge didn’t title it as a Top 10 list. I wonder why that is? Are we reading lists now just for lists’ sake, or is AdAge just enumerating the deals it has figures for?