Microsoft to buy Aquantive for $6 billion

In a bid to boost its presence in advertising, Microsoft announced Friday that it would acquire Aquantive, a digital marketing and services company, in a deal worth around $6 billion.

Microsoft said the deal would help it support more advanced advertising products and technologies across areas including media planning, video-on-demand and IPTV. Aquantive produces the Atlas Media Console and Drive PM tools for advertisers and publishers, and owns interactive ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish.

Things could get interesting in the online advertisement.

 

hope that pushes off google

 

this could be a great move for microsoft

 

I wonder what impact this would have on the advertising market.

 

That's a good move indeed. Well, it will be additional competition for google. Guess that way it will be more productive.

 

I doubt that it will increase their online presence all that much. It is not as big of a move as Google's purchase of DoubleClick. I've never even heard of Aquantive before, whereas I have heard of DoubleClick before.

 

Holy shit, anyone notice the stock jump? It pretty much doubled in value. You could've made 2x your investment in 1 day! Too bad it already jumped.

 

What is Aquantive?

 

It looks like aquantive deal in high end (top 250 publishers)
here's their site

and a bbc story on it

 

Never heard of Aquantive..
It seems it's not very popular so far. However, knowning the budget of Microsoft this can and probably will change very fast.

 

Hmm, do I sense advertisments coming to the Xbox 360 Video Marketplace and later the IPTV they are planning with this?

 

Wow, somebody has their checkbook out this quarter!

 

Microsoft always make a smart move, they dont them often but when they do its big

 

Nobody has even heard of this company and Microsoft spends 6 billion dollars. I hope there shareholders don't ask for there money back.

 

Here's the story: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070518/microsoft_aquantive.html?.v=20

 

No wonder Microsoft's stock price went down today. Aquantive's went up drastically, but Microsoft's went down showing that shareholders aren't confident that the purchase will help Microsoft in the long run.

 

I woudn't read too much into it. MSFT went down less than half a percent on average volume.

 

Well paying more then 36 times what Aquantive's makes in profit shows that Microsoft is under a lot of pressure to make this deal work. It can no longer be number 3 in ads revenues.

 

Microsoft bought Aquantive to stay relevant in the online ad market. Microsoft is number 3 and nobody even heard of Aquantive. What other good reason is there but to just seem relevant? Make it seem like your really trying to make adcenter work.