Ok, maybe all's not well at DoubleClick after all. As you know, the first sign of trouble came in the middle of October, when the company cut "administrative staff" from its media division.
Interestingly enough, when I called DoubleClick for comment that October day, the company PR department told me that Barry Saltzman, the head of the division, was in... Paris!
But, spokespeople
denied all rumors that DoubleClick was getting ready to get out of the media business.
Within two weeks, DoubleClick was picked by one of the biggest automotive sites on the web - AutoTrader.com
- to provide exclusive ad sales representation. Then, DoubleClick expanded its offering to deliver rich media opportunities across its entire Media Network of over 1,700 sites and launched a new
Shaped Pop-up ad unit, which everyone buzzed about for a while.
That was the end of the good news. Last Thursday, Barry Saltzman resigned.
Today, we found out that the company has shut down
its Media Match network, which was launched in August of 2000 to enable Web publishers to make productive use of unsold ad inventory. As of February, Media Match was running several hundred million
monthly impressions and 85 sites had taken advantage of the solution but last week, according to an email sent to customers, "...DoubleClick has made a decision to shut down the Media Match network."
"After looking at the current user acceptance of the product and the current market conditions we felt that the Media Match network didn't match our current business needs," the email stated.
Although a request for DoubleClick comment went unanswered as of this minute, the Media Match information page of the DoubleClick site is unavailable.
Any predictions on what will happen next?