DoubleClick, every mention

Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired Aug 26, 2025 · 38 mentions

• ▶ 1:12:34 Ben Gilbert I believe, just to foreshadow our next chapter, that was in the form of programmatic advertising that was on the DoubleClick ad exchange that they were using to make money.
• ▶ 1:30:36 Ben Gilbert We may as well follow up YouTube with DoubleClick.
• ▶ 1:32:56 David Rosenthal So, double click.
• ▶ 1:33:12 David Rosenthal Basically double that a few months later in April of 2007 when they bought DoubleClick for 3.1 billion dollars in cash this time, not stock.
• ▶ 1:33:50 Ben Gilbert So DoubleClick actually has a fascinating company history before Google that I did not know.
• ▶ 1:34:04 Ben Gilbert Alright, so here's the DoubleClick story, and huge thank you.
• ▶ 1:34:13 Ben Gilbert DoubleClick was originally founded in 1995.
• ▶ 1:34:57 Ben Gilbert 70% of DoubleClick's customers, not only
• ▶ 1:35:03 Ben Gilbert A huge amount of DoubleClick's advertisers were actually VC-backed startups.
• ▶ 1:36:54 Ben Gilbert So, from DoubleClick originally.
• ▶ 1:36:56 David Rosenthal Many would argue the best thing that Google got in the DoubleClick acquisition.
• ▶ 1:39:52 Ben Gilbert The way DoubleClick worked and performed a lot of really fancy stuff like frequency capping to make sure you don't see the same ad 46 times is third-party cookies.
• ▶ 1:40:01 Ben Gilbert Google was philosophically opposed to using third-party cookies, so they couldn't do stuff like that, but DoubleClick could.
• ▶ 1:40:37 Ben Gilbert So Google decided they'd like to buy DoubleClick.
• ▶ 1:40:44 David Rosenthal The reality is, think back to how you started when I interjected and I said, gosh, a lot of what DoubleClick is doing, it really sounds a lot like what Google is doing, right?
• ▶ 1:40:59 David Rosenthal Tim, of course, was head of sales at Google for many years, and we were asking Tim about DoubleClick, and he was like, well, I was close with the DoubleClick guys, and I wanted to meet with them here in kind of late 2006, early 2007, and…
• ▶ 1:41:36 David Rosenthal There is only one reason why the double click guys are going to be in Seattle.
• ▶ 1:42:49 Ben Gilbert So, the negotiations are kind of happening with Microsoft and DoubleClick.
• ▶ 1:43:05 Ben Gilbert The person who is escorting him into the DoubleClick building sent them to a floor, and they sort of freak out when the door opens, and they're like, trying to close the door, like, please go to the other floor.
• ▶ 1:43:41 Ben Gilbert There's a whole presentation series that happens where Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Google are basically all getting the pitch and DoubleClick is now showing.
• ▶ 1:43:50 David Rosenthal I'm imagining they're all like in an auditorium and DoubleClick is presenting on stage.
• ▶ 1:43:54 Ben Gilbert Dude, there was a spreadsheet called YMAG.XLS and the reason they created it is they're effectively trying to show in each of these presentations, here's how much incremental money you'll make if you own DoubleClick and you tie it into…
• ▶ 1:44:10 Ben Gilbert Add system, and they're tweaking the numbers slightly for each one, so Google then submits their LOI for 3.1 billion dollars, and it includes a clause where they can't shop the deal around during this diligence period, and so the whole…
• ▶ 1:44:34 Ben Gilbert The company's counsel, this is DoubleClick, checked her BlackBerry and held it up for David Rosenblatt to see.
• ▶ 1:44:43 Ben Gilbert They were willing to match the offer for DoubleClick, and the message included an email from Steve Ballmer saying that he opened the door for a much higher offer.
• ▶ 1:44:51 Ben Gilbert Ballmer wrote that if the offer match was not acceptable, DoubleClick should simply mark up the paper to meet its needs and then sign it, and Microsoft would review and rapidly countersign to close the deal with minimal negotiation…
• ▶ 1:45:09 Ben Gilbert Ultimately, a week goes by, and they're in this period where they can't really respond, and they're supposed to just kind of proceed with Google, and a day before the LOI is set to expire, the DoubleClick team gets an updated term sheet…
• ▶ 1:45:40 Ben Gilbert Double click just signs it, 3.1 billion, and the private equity firm turns that one billion, which was levered.
• ▶ 1:46:02 David Rosenthal Double click, bringing it into Google did really help with those fat money pipes, as I was saying, of dollar flows from ad agencies.
• ▶ 1:46:12 David Rosenthal But the biggest thing was DoubleClick was the number one player in the space.
• ▶ 1:46:23 Ben Gilbert They were like, we really wish we had gotten DoubleClick, and then within months.
• ▶ 1:47:45 Ben Gilbert Google executives get up on a stage where they're inspiring people about the future of the company and talk about basically anything DoubleClick is doing.
• ▶ 1:48:42 David Rosenthal Absent double click.
• ▶ 1:48:44 Ben Gilbert Without buying double click.
• ▶ 3:09:37 Ben Gilbert One, it's what we're actually looking for, the acquisition of traffic to Google search, and the other component is money that we paid to publishers where our ads show up in the sort of double-click AdSense world.
• ▶ 3:10:02 Ben Gilbert So you could say, ok, they probably paid out about twenty one billion dollars of that fifty five billion in the AdSense double click Google network world.
• ▶ 3:38:00 Ben Gilbert The, the smaller part is over in DoubleClick AdSense land, and actually that's pretty low margin revenue.
• ▶ 3:51:23 Ben Gilbert Famously, I mean, that, that run in the 2010, aside from the big ones, from YouTube, from Android, from DoubleClick, from AdMob, there was also what became Google Groups, Spreadsheets, Docs, Blogger, they bought Applied Semantics with the…