• by April 21, 2005

In case you haven't already heard, DoubleClick's stock jumped 17 percent from $1.30 to $8.60 on news that Hellman & Friedman, a San Francisco-based buyout firm, is closing in on an acquisition of the Internet pioneer that's estimated at nearly $1.2 billion.

We can't figure out where the $1.2 billion figure comes from, but have been making vague comparisons in our head to America Online's nearly $500 million acquisition of Advertising.com last June, and similar figures for Dow Jones' scoop-up of MarketWatch.com and the New York Times Co.'s About.com play. How does it figure that DoubleClick is worth $1.2 billion?

Speculative news reports are all over the Web, in the papers, and on TV. According to New York's favorite tabloid, the Post, General Atlantic Partners and Cerberus Capital Management have teamed up to counter the Hellman bid. One can't really underestimate the Cerberus bid. Why? Media mogul Tom Rogers, who's effectively running the TiVo board (hence TiVo), is Cerberus' media and entertainment honcho. Rogers was instrumental in the deal TiVo finally struck with Comcast to market and distribute its digital video recorder technology. Rogers is hot on digital media, thus he's striking while the iron is plenty hot.

What we still don't know about the DoubleClick situation is whether the company will be sold as a whole or in parts. The company derives most of its revenue from ad management software for advertisers and online publishers, plus its Abacus and Data Management units. Those units sell products and services to direct marketers.