Monday, April 16, 2007

DoubleClick "Gaudy and Irrelevant"

Ionut found an interesting bit on the Google/ DoubleClick relation. Quote from John Battelle’s book The Search:

There was always the fallback of simply running banners on Google’s prodigious traffic – one deal with DoubleClick, an ad network that specialized in serving graphical banners, would probably net the company millions of dollars. But that felt like a sellout – DoubleClick’s ads were often gaudy and irrelevant. They represented everything Page and Brin felt was wrong with the Internet. “They didn’t want to turn the Web site into the online version of Forty-second Street,” recalls investor and director Michael Moritz.

Times change. People change. I wonder if Larry and Sergey would have believed any of the following prophecies in the 1990s:

• “You will offer a framework that allows users to put horoscopes on the Google homepage”
• “You will censor human rights watch groups from search results in some countries”
• “You will buy DoubleClick”
• “You will buy a video site at a time where you already developed a video site of your own”
• “You will bundle Real Player with your Google software to offer it for download, and this download will be installed over 60 million times”
• “You will offer animated graphic ads to webmasters”

DoubleClick "Gaudy and Ir ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (12)

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