It's back to the future. Last week, AOL (NYSE:TWX) spent $435 to buy a dot-com venture called Advertising.com. A company called Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) went public and was up more than 50% on its first day of trading.
It may not be the return of the Bubble Days, but it looks like a discernable echo.
And this week, there was another interesting dot-com deal: aQuantive (NASDAQ:AQNT) agreed to buy SBI.Razorfish for $160 million (of which $85 million is in cash and the rest in convertible notes).
SBI.Razorfish is actually the world's largest interactive agency, providing services such as website designs, portals, and marketing. The firm generated $93 million in 2003 and has major clients like Ford, Kraft, and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).
Founded in 1997, aQuantive is a conglomeration of various Web properties for online marketing and digital media. There are two interactive agencies -- Avenue A and i-FRONTIER. Atlas DMT provides technologies for online marketing campaign management and DRIVEpm provides ad-serving solutions.
aQuantive plans to combine SBI.Razorfish with Avenue A -- a powerful marketing combination. It makes a lot of sense. Avenue A, for example, has marketing that brings visitors to sites, while SBI.Razorfish has expertise in user conversion, as well as keeping users coming back to the site.
Not long ago, many pundits declared the death of online advertising. Well, it has been greatly exaggerated, as the industry is red hot with incredible growth from players like Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) and Google. What it means: expect much more dealmaking in the sector over the near term.
Fool contributor Tom Taulli is the author of The EDGAR Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements . He does not own shares in any stocks mentioned.
