Via SearchEngineWatch: Excerpt: “Is Google moving towards being a total online advertising resource? Absolutely, they have search, analytics, content publishing resources both with AdSense and the newly added YouTube, and now an ad serving platform with video and rich media expertise – but also tracking abilities for the source of the pageviews, and more importantly the ability to monitor behavior across all sources of traffic.
Add DoubleClick and Google now has access to the bulk of the world’s online behavior. Not only search behavior, but anywhere they are controlling the ads. Impression and click counts are not the only thing they gain buying DoubleClick.
They tried to get the world to give them access to online behavior when they bought Urchin and started giving away online analytics. Fortunately the majority of online companies decided to keep paying independent third parties – though Google would have had no problem forcing out all the web analytics companies that needed to have their customers pay for their programs.
The buy of DoubleClick is another end run – sure Google is claiming they will not use this information – bit hard not to collect it – but with each step Google is fast becoming Big Brother.”
“Google, DoubleClick: Myths and Facts.” Frank Watson. October 22, 2007
