Google pays $3.1bn for some key relationships

In buying Doubleclick, Google has not just taken the plunge and going very hard after the display advertising space but bought in some of the web's longest standing advertiser and publishers relationships not to say an enormous amount of critical data.

Google's move is very aggressive and expensive, but also very smart. Doubleclick may have had less compelling technology than many others, including Atlas but its relationships are second to none.

Although there is so much change and innovation going on in the advertising space right now between services like Spotrunner, Feedburner, Tacoda, Videoegg and Quigo - relationships still count for more than anything in themarketing services world.

There's been lots of coverage and conjecture in the blogosphere about the motivations (see Om, Mike, John Battelle and Steve Rubel) and Google has covered the deal extensively on their blogs.

This is going to be very interesting as online advertising continues to eat share of the overall marketing budget, Microsoft, Yahoo, News Corp (MySpace), Time Warner (AOL) and any other media owner who depends on advertising revenue will need to think twice as hard now about how to effectively compete with Google's advertising machine.