• by Wayne Friedman , October 2, 2014

Media and marketing deal-making continued to rise in the first three months of the year with more costly transactions.

Some 1,128 deals were made in the first nine months of the year -- worth $94 billion, versus $45 billion for the first nine months of 2013 (1,056 deals), says Jordan, Edmiston Group Inc.

The survey says 35 transactions were over $500 million, compared to 17 of those deals through the third quarter of 2013. Fifteen of those deals were over $1 billion. The biggest of these was Facebook’s $19 billion buy of mobile messaging app WhatsApp in the first quarter.

Some 155 deals were between $50 million and $500 million, versus 110 in the same period a year before.

Other big deals during the period include Gannett’s acquisition of Classified Ventures, which owns Cars.com, for $2.5 billion; Priceline’s purchase of restaurant reservation company OpenTable for $2.6 billion; and Relativity Media buy of Fullscreen, a builder of digital channels on YouTube for nearly $1 billion.

Last year totaled $66.7 billion worth of deals -- some 1,393 transactions. This was down from the total deal volume in 2012 of $74.7 billion, coming from 1,351 transactions. Media and marketing deals hit their peak in 2007, a pre-recession period, at $104.4 billion.