ValueClick to Acquire Fastclick

[dnathan]

ValueClick to Acquire Fastclick; Transaction to Position ValueClick as the Largest Online Ad Network Provider

WESTLAKE VILLAGE & SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 11, 2005--ValueClick, Inc. (Nasdaq:VCLK) and Fastclick, Inc. (Nasdaq:FSTC) today jointly announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement in which Fastclick would become a wholly-owned subsidiary of ValueClick. Fastclick provides online advertising services and technologies, including an advertising network of more than 9,000 third-party Websites that reaches over 112 million unique U.S. Internet users (Source: comScore Media Metrix June 2005 Ad-Focus Report). In the transaction, each outstanding share of Fastclick common stock will be exchanged for 0.7928 of a share of ValueClick common stock.

[home.businesswire.com...]

[edited by: engine at 1:32 pm (utc) on Aug. 15, 2005]

[jdubo79]

Yup, saw this one coming

[jdubo79]

How is no one replying to this, this is HUGE news. Ok, that is now my last attempt to bump this post to the top of the forum :)

[iblaine]

Yet another blow to the people at fastclick. The company goes public for $13/share and 6 months later is sold for $10/share? Ouch. It was tempting to load up on Fastclick stock knowing that they would be acquired by Valueclick but Valuclick has a history of buying companies at bargain prices.

[cellularnews]

ValueClick is paying some US$214 million in stock to buy the (mainly) pop-under ad agency, Fastclick.

Fastclick claims to have 9,000 web sites on its books.

I actually ditched Fastclick for a major site recently as the revenue from on-page advertising was growing at a rate that enabled me to get rid of annoying pop-unders.

Also, the rise of pop-under blockers means that Fastclick is operating in a shrinking market - their onpage banners have never done well for us in compareson to Google's Adsence and Tribalfusion's adverts.

ValueClick do tend to be operating in the same "barrel scraping" cheap ads market as Fastlick, so no real upsell benefit there for publishers either.

[dougs]

ValueClick have been buying lots of online players, inc pricerunner, have their own ppc engine, banner ads company, channels into every major player. They control a large amount of visitors and have just acquired an inkjet company.

So not only are they trying to control some traffic they are buying companies who can turn the traffic into a real business........there seems lots of logic here.

Doug

[Matt Probert]

We use Fastclick, not for pop-under adverts (instead we use Casale for them) but primarily for banner adverts (leaderboards) which perform far better on a general site such as our than Google Adsense (we ditched Google for Targetpoint some time ago).

Valueclick we dumped years ago, and their takeover of Fastclick is seriously worrying news to this Fastclick partner publishing company. What concerns me is that eCPM may be significantly lowered. Fastclick have always been a good company to partner.

Matt