Online advertising specialist ValueClick (Nasdaq: VCLK) is jumping like a scorched chinchilla today, gaining as much as 14% after a surprisingly strong fourth-quarter report. This time, there was no phantom tax benefit to explain the gains.
Like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) before it, ValueClick simply reported strong holiday sales as shoppers are getting used to finding deals online. Revenue jumped 17% over the year-ago quarter to land at $129 million, or about $4 million more than the analyst consensus. The sales trickled down to created $0.26 of adjusted earnings per share, comparing favorably to the $0.23 estimate.
The integration of the Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) portal with search results from Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Bing was expected to disrupt the revenues ValueClick gets from Yahoo-related traffic, but that change did less damage than expected.
Even after today's jump, ValueClick arguably remains value-priced in contrast to rivals Google and Digital River (Nasdaq: DRIV), and may be buyout bait for a bigger and richer online operator.
The company isn't squandering its opportunities these days, and is in the habit of putting its cash flows to good use by buying back a lot of its own stock. ValueClick generated $90 million of free cash in 2010. The $42 million buyout of investing resource Investopedia was balanced out by the $45 million spinoff of advertising lead service Web Marketing Holdings, so that's a wash.
However, ValueClick freely admits that there are virtually no barriers to entry in the online marketing industry, and is facing down a bevy of bigger, stronger, and better-performing rivals. Our CAPS community gives the stock a less-than-flattering two stars out of five, and the 8.7% short interest in the stock includes a thumbs-down position from our own Big Short newsletter. From that point of view, this jump looks like a signal to open a short position as ValueClick is hovering around 52-week highs at the moment.
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