Biz Dev in NYC by Rob Tsai

I wish I would have bought aQuantive stock, in the wake of the Google and Yahoo deals.  It wasn’t too hard to see the M&A frenzy in this space, and aQuantive’s position as a leading technology and service player for publishers and agencies was in plain site.  The stock is up 80% in early market trading!

TechCrunch covers the news of the deal here.

In my earlier post, I ran some crude analyses of valuations based on monthly impressions served.  Of course, aQuantive has other businesses besides its two ad serving products (Atlas, Accipiter) and 24/7 has other businesses besides its ad serving product OAS - but it’s interesting nonetheless to lay out the metrics.  Here’s the updated spreadsheet:

 Also, check out Ashkan’s post at HipMojo on why aQuantive is worth 2x Doubleclick.

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Update:

Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed linked to this post and kindly pointed out my dyslexia (my earlier chart had a couple columns reversed.

One of his readers, Dutch at Dutch Tender, was critical of this analysis for not adjusting for valuation for the other pieces of aQuantive (avenueA and Drive PM) - and so I thought I’d put in the extra work to make that modification.  (Dutch makes a good point that in blogging, there is a balance of speed to market and providing good insights - and good posts should win out in the end).

The analysis is still a little wonky - mostly because the revenue multiples I’m ascribing to the ad network side of the business and the agency side of the business are probably way too low.  (using a couple comps like AOL’s purchase of Ad.com and the current trading multiple of Omnicom).

It gets us a little closer to the truth…..  if someone wants to run the full comps analysis, I’d be happy to update this post again.