Who Bought Who Lately: Acquisition Round-Up and Analysis

Does it seem lately, like every time you check the news, a new company, service or site has been acquired? Every week it feels like another piece of the Web is being snapped up at some pretty impressive prices.

We thought it might be a good time for a round-up of some of the more interesting (and relevant) recent acquisitions of the last year or so. Following is a graph which outlines recent acquisitions by date:

Acquisition Spend Over Time

Following is a graph of acquisition spend numbers over time (click for larger graph):

Acquisition Groups

There appears to be a trend towards buying companies in specific industries. Following is a run-down on which industries seem to be popular:

Based on these 4 industries, following is a chart outlining the distribution of industries in recent acquisitions (click for larger graph):

Analysis

From this data, it may be possible to assume the following:

• Online Advertising is heating up in a big way with major investments across the board as companies scramble over each other to gain the most market share now
• Google either doesn’t care about Mobile services, or is developing systems in-house
• Yahoo is either no longer interested in capitalizing on it’s earlier success with maps, or is developing systems in-house
• While Google is investing heavily in video, Microsoft is either behind the ball or is developing systems in-house

It’s probably only natural that the overall “Advertising” Industry is gaining the most attention at the moment. As more and more traditional marketers realize the potentially lucrative opportunities here (and the fact that Search Inventory is limited), more and more ad inventory will be needed. Hence, the Ad Inventory Gold Rush is on.

Anyone need a shovel?

(Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments)

Late Additions:
New acquisitions since this article was posted about an hour ago:

MySpace acquiring Photobucket

Fox Interactive Media acquiring Flektor

Nothing is better than Toronto in the summertime. Besides the fact that every good patio in the city is open, the summer brings an amazing number of festivals and events. The list of activities Toronto has to offer is as long as it is diverse. Center Island, the North by Northeast Music and Film Festival and Caribana are all fun but this summer topping my to-do list are the Toronto happenings that are exciting and appealing to my inner web geek.

Search Engine Strategies Toronto

When: Tuesday June 12th to Wednesday June 13th
Where: Metro Toronto Convention Centre in the North Building

The largest Internet Search Conference and Expo in Canada and a gathering place for the rock stars of the search engine marketing and optimization world.

Search Engine Strategies (SES) is always a good time with lots of opportunities to make new contacts and talk shop. This year the sessions look particularly interesting. Some of the old standards have been drooped from the roster to make room for new topics.

SES is particularly exciting for NLC this year as our own Helen M. Overland will be speaking on the Get Dugg! Social Media and WOM Targeting Tips panel along side Rand Fishkin and Neil Patel.

Toronto
Tech Week

When: Monday May 28th to Friday June 1st, 2007
Where: Everywhere! See the Toronto Tech Week event calendar

A week long series of events to celebrate technology in T.O. This is a week of opportunity for new projects, businesses, sales, and recruitment. Tech Week is all about celebrating and promoting technology in Toronto. The week is jam packed with events including:

• The mesh conference, I am looking forward to this one as there tons of interesting speakers including Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com, Leesa Barnes of Podonomics and Tom Williams of GiveMeaning.com.
• Enterprise 2.0 Conference, with Anthony Williams, the co-author “Wikinomics”.
• InteractionCamp an ‘unconference’ for everyone with an interest in designing interactive customer experiences brought to you by the folks at BarCamp.
• Canadian New Media Awards. The 7th annual Canadian New Media Awards continues to recognize and celebrate the best and the brightest of the Canadian new media industry.

BarCamp / TorCamp: Open Coffee

When: Every Thursday at 10 am
Where: Tequila Bookwork Cafe

Free Wifi and an informal chat about all things tech on the start up scene.

TorCamp is the community in the center of the Toronto technology scene. Toronto’s designers, developers, marketers, PR people, executives, testers, QA specialists, consultants, recruiters, network administrators, business developers, VC’s, angel investors, policy analysts, etc. meet on a regular basis to talk shop and network. For anyone one who has ever alienated friends and family with too much tech talk this is the perfect venue.

Everybody has a different way of writing their PPC ads, and some ways are more efficient than others. Seeing some of the confusion over what method is easiest to write ads, I thought it might be nice to share the method that’s worked for me for years.

My experience has been that many people just type their ads in to the ad platform (such as AdWords), and attempt to construct an ad that fits. This has the advantage of counting the characters as you type, but has the disadvantage of creating a focus on ad length instead ad effectiveness. If you are concentrating on the characters counting down, you may not be focussing on the quality of the ad.

Others prefer to write ads out in Word and count the characters. This has the advantage of being able to write your message first, and then make it fit after. The drawback is that, unless you are very experienced in writing ads, you have to write first with no real idea of how much space you have, and then cram, cram and cut words later until you can make the text fit.

The method that I personally prefer, which balances out a focus on ad effectiveness with ad length, is to use the simple, humble text file. If you can use a plain vanilla text editor (such as Notepad) that uses a fixed-width font (such as Courier or Lucida Console), you can take advantage of this method.

Download the following file, and take a look inside - and remember, you must view it with a fixed-width font, so just go ahead and open it in Notepad (unless you have customized your Notepad fonts, in which case you will have to customize them back).

Download PPC Ad Template

As you can see, you can use the guidelines to have a clear visual idea, right on the page, of how much space you have to write your message. Does your ad go over? No problem - just edit it and move the text around. In the case of the Google ad, you can visually see the structure your ad will have in terms of lines wrapping, etc.

One of the most fundamental steps in writing effective ads is to determine your strategy first - Both WHO you are addressing, and HOW is best to address them. Create your ad messaging first, and make it fit into the allowed space after, and you are on your way to creating more effective ads.

Yesterday, Google introduced the new version of Google analytics at the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco. We here at NLC are very excited about these new changes! After playing around with these new features, I’ll try to summarize some key new features that have caught our eye.

1. Customized Dashboard

In the past, there were three pre-defined dashboard views, the Marketer, Executive and Webmaster views. But what if you are a webmaster who also handles the marketing? Or an executive that works closely with web development? The new dashboard page allows you to pick and choose all the reports that are important to you and nothing you don’t need to see.

Underneath each report, you can choose to ‘add to dashboard’.

2. Scheduling Reports and new formats

In the past, you can export your reports in a tab separated text file, XML or Excel CSV file. Now, you have the power to schedule your reports to run daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. But wait! the fun doesn’t stop here, you can now also export in a PDF file so your reports can actually be readily presentable!

3. Improved Interface

While presenting the same data, the new GA simply does a better job of translating data into information. This makes it easier for the non-tech savvy user to better understand their reports.

4. Trend and Over time Graph

Here is my favorite addition. The new graphs are great in showing visually how certain things change over time. For example, the chart below captures the changes in visits in March compared to April. When you mouse over the markers, you can see the hard data during those dates and its difference.

While all of these new gadgets get our heart rates accelerating, there may be some of you who have difficulty adjusting to the new interface. Not to worry, you can still use the previous interface (I believe only for another month) or use the Report Finder Tool.

I am sitting in the office today listening to a colleague grow increasingly frustrated trying to spend several thousand dollars of a clients’ budget. It reminds me of my hard-core E-Comm days, trying to spend marketing budget during the holiday season, and frequently being completely thwarted.

Normally, you would assume that this part of the job is one of the most fun - after all, who doesn’t like to spend someone else’s money? But the sad fact is that sometimes, websites throw up almost insurmountable roadblocks to generating income, frequently simply out of carelessness.

Out of sympathy for my colleague, I thought this might be a good time to cover a few ridiculously simple tips on how you can make it easier for your website to generate income.

1. (And I cannot stress this enough) - Display Contact Information - especially a phone number! Companies that are looking to make a media buy are frequently working on a tight schedule. They shouldn’t have to search at LinkedIn, or run a whois on your domain, to find out who they can contact at your organization. Don’t expect people who want to give you buckets of money to fill out a form and wait a week for an answer, that is - if the form even works at all. The advertiser may want to call and make a deal, today… now… an hour ago. This is business, and it can move quickly.
2. Define Your Offerings - Create a page for advertisers that lists what you are willing to offer. Do you offer text ads? Banner ads? Interactive flash ads? Offer newsletter sponsorships, or branded e-blasts? Do you have a podcast, and are you willing to drop in a sound ad? Would you consider an ad in your RSS feed? Clearly lay out to advertisers what opportunities you offer - help them research and judge their needs before they make the call to you.
3. Consider Showing Some Traffic Stats - You don’t have to give away the farm… but let potential advertisers know whether you have 1,000 unique visitors per month, or 1,000,000. This simple information can get your site shortlisted in the media plan.
4. Demographic Information - Many traditional marketers prefer to have demographic information such as age, gender, location, etc. before making a media buy. If you don’t have this information, consider running a survey to collect what you can - it can make life much easier for the media agency to “sell” your website to the client if they can go armed with this information.
5. Consider showing past advertisers - If this is within your comfort zone, consider showing advertisers who have previously worked with you. This history can also help the agency demonstrate the worth of your website