Online Ad Deals Hit $20 Billion Over Past Year

Our Newest Report: Online Advertising VC and M&A Deals In The Last Year

from paidContent.org by Rafat Ali

Following our analysis of Social Media Deals, we've pleased to announce our first Online Advertising Deals Report, charting activity in venture capital and mergers & acquisitions from Q107 to Q208. This sector continues to drive online content, reaching annual revenues of $600-800 billion.

The report breaks down these investments and acquisitions into major categories and contains industry analysis from: 

• A future trends piece by Lauren Rich Fine, Practitioner-in-residence at Kent State University and former Managing Director in Merrill Lynch's Equity Research Department. 
  
• Douglas Anmuth, Senior Internet Analyst for Lehman Brothers, with his presentation at our EconAds Conference held recently in NYC
  

The rest of the data is derived from our own reporting at paidContent.org, mocoNews.net,ContentSutra.com and paidContent:UK, and supplemented with coverage of EconAds.

Order your report to learn about increased activity from AOL (NYSE: TWX), Aegis Group, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Draper Fisher Jurvetson and more.

VC Investments: 
-- Total number of investments:160 
-- Total number of disclosed investments: 137 valued at $1,925,830,000 
-- Average investment size: $14,057,153 
-- Best estimated value of overall investment in the space (disclosed and undisclosed): $2,126,620,000

Acquisitions: 
-- Total number of acquisitions: 100 
-- Total number of disclosed acquisitions: 46 valued at $17,535,320,000 
-- Average acquisition size: $327,313,415 
-- Best estimated value of overall transaction in the space (disclosed and undisclosed): $20,594,510,000

The charts below provide a topline overview of how the money was spent (click thumbnails for better view):

                    

Social Media Deals Report: This 199-page report, filled with charts and data, examines the categories, number and size of VC and M&A deal in social media from 2007 through 2008. Visit the ContentNext Reports page

Ad Targeter Lotame Secures $13 Million Second Round

Lotame, which targets ads to users within social networks, has raised a $13 million second round. The round was led by Emergence Capital Partners, along with previous backers Battery Ventures and Hillcrest Management. Lotame, which has offices in Elkridge, MD, and New York City, plans to use the proceeds to upgrade their offerings and to support marketing and business development efforts. The company's main product is called Crowd Control, a targeting tool Lotame is marketing to agencies and advertisers designed to match an ad with topics that consumers have shown recent interest in on social net sites. Lotame analyzes the user info found in what's listed in a consumer's profile—anonymously, the company hastens to add—when a person registers on a site, as well as tracking the blogs they visit, comments they make, videos they watch and so on. Release

Online Ad Deals Hit $20 Billion Over Past Year

by Michael Learmonth

Our friends at PaidContent have been counting up the dollars spent on online ad deals in the last year and change, and have come up with a really big number. According to PC's tally, an eye-popping $20 billion has been spent on 100 acquisitions from Q1 2007 through Q2 2008

That would include some fairly sizeable deals such as Microsoft's (MSFT) acquisition of aQuantive ($6 billion) and Google's (GOOG) acquisition of Doubleclick ($3 billion). Total VC dollars pouring into online advertising hit $2.1 billion spread across 160 investments.