First Marketwatch puts itself up for sale and now Doubleclick. My previous post commented on Marketwatch so I now turn to Doubleclick.

Doubleclick has a nice business, reasonable financials, good cash position and solid history of being a survivor of the Internet stock crash of a few years ago. However in its quest to evolve it lost its charm. The original business was serving ads for one and all. Over time it added different business units that while related to marketing and ads are not really all that connected. And of course the rise of "Paid Search" further hurt Doubleclick. Paid Search meant that Doubleclick could no longer be in the absolute center of the Internet Ad arena.

I have long been a believer that one business unit must sell another. We do not have that in the case of Doubleclick. Thus it is a nice overall business, but not strongly connected --- it lacks true economies of scale.

One could similarly make this criticism about Jupitermedia. But in our case most of the divisions do in fact sell each other. The moral of this history is that it is great to add on business units, but make sure that all of the them can economically sell each other. This is not the case with Doubleclick.