Edwin - 2:10 pm on Feb 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

Could the secret behind all these deals be that PPC is so incredibly lucrative that Overture (relatively) quickly makes back what it's spending to buy out Altavista and now FAST simply by keeping in-house 100% of the PPC revenue, instead of having to split it with partners.

If the above theory is true, then you can probably expect to see them continue to snap up search partners who are serving up large numbers of Overture-based queries. I would have thought Excite/IWon would be an incredibly obvious target for them to go after next... if there is a "next", that is!