How much can Google gobble up?

The last most people heard was the $1.76 billion acquisition of YouTube, but even this mammoth figure has now been dwarfed by the $3.1 billion deal to buy banner ad serving company DoubleClick. Cash. Not bad considering the company fetched $1.1 billion when it went private in 2005. But that's the price you pay when you're bidding against Microsoft.

This raised a few eyebrows in the industry since Google made its money through the 'new generation' formats on online advertising, largely through search marketing, whereas DoubleClick is more a legacy of the old formats such as banners and buttons.

It is this very complimentary nature of the fit that drove the deal, while making Google even more compulsory in this era where digital and online advertising is rising fast, overtaking more traditional media such as radio and even newspapers in some Western markets.

The question many ask is whether Google isn't getting too big. By going 'upstream' in the advertising chain, the company could find itself in a conflict of interest, whereby the temptation to use Google properties as vehicles to advertising may lead online publishers to leave DoubleClick behind.

They already have a love-hate relationship with the online giant. While it does generate traffic to their site and, in cases, advertising revenue, it also competes for the same advertising budgets and even piggy-backs on their content. As Belgian newspapers successfully proved in court, it can be in breach of copyright.

The word monopoly is now being bandied around following this latest purchase. The problem is that it combines a leader in search marketing and a heavy-weight in digital advertising. Together, Google will be able to learn an awful lot about the kind of traffic and the type of ads leading sites receive. This level of scrutiny will prove rather uncomfortable to many, particularly those who regard Google as a competitor.

To the advertising market, the new outfit said it will offer media buyers and sellers more powerful tools for targeting and analyzing online advertisements, also placing them on an even wider network of sites. To them, it will "make Internet advertising better — less intrusive, more effective, and more useful", according to Google's co-founder Sergey Brin.

More significantly maybe, ad serving is a business that Google is trying to get into. Not online, mind you, but for traditional media. After an auction system for print ads, Google has announced earlier this month that they're starting a TV advertisement trial building on their AdSense/ AdWords system. It will also sell commercial airtime on radio in partnership with 675 stations part of Clear Channel in the USA.

Together with EchoStar and Astound Cable, Google is attempting to deliver TV commercials better suited to the broadcasters' viewers. It describes the venture as a way to help advertisers, operators and programmers buy, schedule, deliver and measure ads more efficiently on television.

Interestingly enough, this is precisely what Saudi-based Selevision was proposing to the market more than a year ago but so far hasn't proved to be successful. Maybe all that's needed is for the Google experience to be a success for the local initiative to convert skeptics.

Not everybody is happy with Google's foray into ad serving, be it online or on traditional media, and there is talk of the DoubleClick deal being referred to anti-trust authorities. It may be that no one owns the Internet but Google seems to be intent on taking it over.