Sometimes, acquisitions don’t work out. Sometimes, they do. And the DoubleClick acquisition is definitely an example of the second scenario, as Google shared some numbers this afternoon that paint a picture of remarkable growth.
Today marks the third anniversary of Google’s completion of the DoubleClick purchase, by the way, so keep that in mind when viewing the data. All the progress just occurred over 36 months (and 36 months in which the economy was not at all healthy, at that).
3 years ago today we acquired @doubleclick – kicking off year 4 w/ video ad formats on the Ad Exchange http://goo.gl/2sPQt
A Googler
google
So on to the data. Susan Wojcicki and Neal Mohan indicated on the Official Google Blog that the first number everyone should know is “5,400,000: A rough estimate of the hours our engineers have spent working on our display business since 2008 (that’s equivalent to 616 years without sleep or rest).”
Next, the second number is “33 billion: Our estimate of the number of potential customers that our clients’ display ads have driven immediately to marketers’ websites (to say nothing of the exposure, engagement and brand-building that these ads enable).”
Finally – and just wait for the explanation – the last figure is “5: On sites in the Google Display Network, the number of times larger that spending on display ads is today, compared to three years ago (that’s like a toddler growing to the size of a one-story house).”
It’s little wonder that Google’s stock is now about 33 percent higher than it was on March 11th, 2008, then.
One last note on a slightly different subject: Wojcicki and Mohan said that Google’s will soon test in-stream video ads on YouTube using real-time bidding tech.