Big mouth and €60m

It bolds well for the industry that a marketeer such as bigmouthmedia can get a deal of this magnitude.

I have to say that we at Weboptimiser Media Ltd have been offered a number of deals in the past few years, all of which have come to nothing. Nothing that is other than I have learnt a lot about the business and the type of deals that are possible. I could say that we walked away, we could say that the terms were not up to scratch. In the end, it seemed that the numbers offered just did not make sense, so I hope it works out for Steve and his team.

There have been several 'high profile' industry deals over the years that I can think of, Webgravity reportedly for £1m a few years back, a ppc company for £1m, Iprospect in the US for a tidy sum to a UK firm and so on, these deals are not new. Webgravity has been trying to find its way ever since, the PPC company was a client based turnover deal and I understand that there were some tremours there. I have not heard much about Iprospect since they did their deal and I cannot predict which way bigmouth will go, other than the word which is just one letter away - ego.

So good luck to Steve and his team. Like us they have had their troubles over the years and it is good to see that good outcomes are possible. There is a distinct trend of mergers and acquisitions within this industry and the future looks exciting for those that can get traction in the market. My opinion is that traction in the market is difficult to achieve. Not least of which is because Google and Yahoo have done such a fine job in convincing, allowing, co-ordinating... clients to go direct, through the cloning and suggestion of optimisation techniques.

Ultimately cloning or adopting or creating new optimisation techniques is better for the client and that is the best possible outcome for the industry in the long run. There will always be some clients who will require the services of thrid parties and the best third parties are those that focus on the creation of genuine added value - and this as well as brains takes cash and client momentum. I am certain that this is something that Weboptimiser Media Ltd has, and I can definately see it in one or two of our competitors too, but not in any of the companies that have completed deals recently. That may be their secret. Lets see.

They are of course all welcome to join the IAB UK or Europe and join us on any of the Search Task Force calls.