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Alliance Data Systems Corp. has purchased the email marketing unit for $90 million, and gains access to DoubleClick email clients like AOL and Proctor & Gamble.

The deal follows last year's purchase of DoubleClick for $1.1 billion by a private equity firm based in San Francisco, DMNews.com reported.

Over the past two years, other companies have actively bought up several email marketers, the article said:

The DoubleClick Email Solutions deal comes in a hectic two-year period of mergers and acquisitions involving major e-mail players. Among the firms taken off the market were CheetahMail by Experian, Yesmail by infoUSA, Digital Impact by Acxiom, Postfuture by Harte-Hanks and, most recently, Accucast by Premiere Global.
Alliance also purchased direct marketer Epsilon and the Bigfoot Interactive email marketing firm during the past two years. But will the DoubleClick deal looks like an absolute steal in a couple of years?

DoubleClick's email unit is a business that generates $40 million in revenue. Hellman & Friedman, DoubleClick's owning firm, gave that stream away in exchange for two and a quarter years' revenue. Eric Kirby, general manager of DoubleClick Email Solutions, New York said in the report DoubleClick has reasons for doing so:

"The sale is consistent with a strategy that DoubleClick has been exercising for a year now, which is to focus full resources within the core business line. Email Solutions has been one of the core solutions, but the difference being that based on the overall direction of the e-mail and database services market, the most logical strategy was to combine our e-mail business with Epsilon Interactive."

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.