On April 13, 2007, Google agreed to acquire DoubleClick for US$3.1 billion in cash. Google had already been in the advertising business since 2000, with its Adwords product. Buying Doubleclick further sent Google down the road of funding itself through selling advertising.
The deal raised concerns surrounding competition with both the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the European Union. These concerns slowed the completion of the deal, pushing it into 2008. In May 2007, the FTC requested additional information about the deal after it was urged by competitors, including Microsoft and AT&T, who believed it would give Google too much control over online advertising. Google countered by launching a formal complaint about the search functionality in Windows Vista, which meant Vista Service Pack 1 gained the ability to specify a default desktop search program.
On December 20, 2007, the FTC approved Google’s purchase of DoubleClick from its owners Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity. European Union regulators took longer to give approval, doing so March 11, 2008. Google completed the acquisition later that day.
In November 2007, shortly after the announcement of the Google acquisition, reports surfaced that DoubleClick had been serving ads designed to trick users into buying malware. This occurred after a malicious website tricked several name-brand websites into serving the ads.
Google retired the Doubleclick name in June 2018, folding its services into the Google Marketing Platform and Google Ad Manager.
Google made a number of acquisitions over the years, but Doubleclick and Youtube were two of the most consequential.
Doubleclick before Google
DoubleClick Inc. was an American advertisement company that developed and provided Internet ad serving services. It was an independent company from 1995 until its acquisition by Google in March 2008. DoubleClick offered technology products and services primarily to advertising agencies and mass media. Its advertisers included Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L’Oréal, Palm, Inc., Apple Inc., Visa Inc., Nike, Inc., and Carlsberg Group. The company’s main product line was known as DART (Dynamic Advertising, Reporting, and Targeting), intended to increase the purchasing efficiency of advertisers and minimize unsold inventory for publishers. DoubleClick is one of the earliest known Application Service Providers (ASP) for Internet ad-serving. It primarily served banner ads.
In 1995, Kevin O’Connor and Dwight Merriman developed the concept for DoubleClick in O’Connor’s basement. They created a system to display banner ads across a network of websites and track their performance to better target internet users. Entrepreneur Kevin Ryan joined as the company’s CFO and later became its CEO.
Later that year, O’Connor and Merriman met Fergus O’Daily, the CEO of Poppe Tyson. Poppe Tyson had created an Interactive Sales division, but lacked the technology to deliver online ads across its network of client’s sites. O’Connor, Merriman, and O’Daily decided to merge the two companies.
Doubleclick held an IPO Feb 27, 1998 and raised $60 million, about double its expectation, although the company was not yet profitable. It was the third dotcom IPO of 1998.
Private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity acquired Doubleclick in July 2005. On March 11, 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Just prior to the acquisition, Doubleclick had approximately 1,500 employees, 1,200 of them in the United States.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Hi Dave,
I looked around your site but didn’t find a “Contact” form for you. Your older article https://dfarq.homeip.net/commodore-hardware-viruses-yes-they-were-possible/ was posted over at Two Stop Bits today and triggered some 40 year-old memories. I wrote up my thoughts there and wanted to share it with you too. If you find any part of it interesting, please feel free to use all or part of it however you’d like.
> he’d seen protection schemes that, if they detected you had tampered with them, would try to break your disk drive in retaliation. The most common way to do this was to send the drive a command to try to move the drive’s stepper motor beyond its physical range. The drive would oblige and try to do the impossible, so it was possible to command the drive to permanently damage its own drive mechanism.
I didn’t have a C64 and my Radio Shack Coco had a less complex disk drive mechanism based around a standard Western Digital disk controller chip, but there were similar copy protections on some software titles.
While I’m sure someone did tell Dave this story, and that person may have believed it themselves, I suspect it’s based on a mistaken extrapolation of a more innocent behavior. Way back in the day, we heard a similar report at my local user’s group but a techie friend of mine looked into the offending software title and discovered a reality that was more benign. Basically, during manufacturing disk protections tend to put some non-standard formatting someplace on the original disk and then the software tries to read back the non-standard stuff to verify it’s the original disk. These could be extra, missing or mis-numbered tracks or sectors. Some protections also put data on an extra track added beyond the last track. Coco disks had 35 “official” tracks in the specification but users quickly learned that these drives were manufactured as 40 track drives, of which some didn’t pass QA tests seeking all the way to track 40 and were sold cheaper to Radio Shack. But I never saw a Radio Shack Coco drive that wouldn’t seek to track 36, 37 and usually more. I eventually had four drives and all of them would reliably seek to track 41 or 42. In fact, hobbyists made mods for the disk operating system to add extra tracks to the official count. So, at least on the Coco, there were multiple disk protections that would seek the head “beyond the last track”, not to damage the drive but because they knew the original disk had data there which all drives could read but no normal disk copy command would write.
The other thing to know is that all these floppy drives were inexpensive, mass-manufactured mechanical devices that had varying tolerances between individual units at the factory which only grew with wear over time, temperature, shipping and handling. Also the diskettes themselves weren’t exactly made to exacting mil-spec standards. So, to read the disk the controller software would seek to the desired track and try to read the requested sector. It wasn’t terribly unusual for a read to fail and time out due to the head moving a bit too slow or perhaps initially undershooting or overshooting the target track. So all controller software would move the head back (usually to track zero) and then try to step back to the desired track and do the read again. If it didn’t work, it would repeat this several times hoping to get a good read before eventually failing with an error. When these rapid head resets and retries happened, the drive would make a loud and unusual “gronking” sound that was quite noticeable. And that was just with normal disks and no oddball disk formatting or trick-play head seeking.
When disk protections would fail to find the expected oddball tracks or sectors, they’d do the same reset/retry behavior with the same furious gronking. Except in the case of disk protections half the sectors on a track could be “special” (on the Coco there were 18 sectors on a track). At 3 or 5 retries each, that’s a lot of loud head gronking for a long time as each sector is attempted and fails out in turn. Such was the case with the protected software title my friend disassembled. The erstwhile failed pirate at our user’s group meeting (a middle schooler) was trying to start a copy of the game which had none of the “special” sectors present. While I doubt all that gronking was *good* for the disk mechanism, it wasn’t intentionally malicious on the part of the software title. But you can see how the loud gronking sounds which only happened on an attempt to pirate a copy of a protected disk could cause people to make assumptions and leap to nefarious conclusions which would then be further embellished through the retelling.
Of course, I don’t doubt that some hobbyist hacker or maybe solo software dev had nefarious thoughts and maybe even played around with how to do it and showed their friends a demo. But I never saw or heard any credible claims a commercial software title sold at scale ever shipped to consumers with the intent to destroy user hardware. Even in those days software was sold by publishers to distributors who then sold to retail stores, who sold to end users. A national wave of failed hardware reports associated with one title could mean blame and perhaps even legal liability for any and all of those parties. And disassembling the software sufficiently to prove it was doing this intentionally would have been much easier than making working pirated copies. To be so reckless, not only would the author have to be really dumb, so would the publisher and anyone who knew about it in advance.
The kicker is that, in those days, bulk duplication of diskettes (especially funkily formatted diskettes) wasn’t all that reliable – meaning there was a pretty high probability that some non-zero percentage of your legit copies sometimes wouldn’t read correctly for a paying customer due to varying manufacturing tolerances (or stray magnetic fields in shipping). And, of course, this failure to read could cause the copy protection to detect the legit disk as “pirated”. Back in the 80s and 90s I worked for a successful software manufacturer and one of our products was a large, professional tool which eventually grew to occupy well over a dozen 3.5 inch floppy disks. When a disk wouldn’t read for a customer it was a costly warranty issue to ship them a new disk set (and there was no consumer internet). As our software and disk count grew, we saw increasing disk failures. So we analyzed it and despite using the top disk duplicator in the U.S. and legit top-notch, direct-from-the-Sony-factory media – once our install was over a dozen diskettes, the statistical best case was almost every fourth customer would have at least one disk from their set fail to read. And this is without any funky formatting! Fortunately, CD-ROM became a thing shortly thereafter but the point is, the top disk duplicator in the country confirmed that “Yep, we do this better than anyone and your media is the best money can buy – and you’re getting the expected field failure rate.” So, selling hardware destroying time bombs would have been incredibly stupid, because statistically inevitable failures would certainly harm the hardware of more than one legitimate paying customer by mistake, and *that* would result in a very fast (but quite spectacular) fireball of infamy for any company dumb enough to try it.