Shares of aQuantive rose 12.24% to a seven-year high, 24/7 Real Media saw a gain of 10.61%, and ValueClick's stock was up 2.34% yesterday as the market rewarded online advertising's new darlings after
the weekend announcement by Google that it is acquiring DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.
CIBC World Markets analyst Paul Keung upgraded aQuantive to a sector outperformer. JPMorgan
analyst Imran Khan issued a prediction that aQuantive will benefit from a more stable pricing environment in 2007 and 2008. He upgraded the stock to overweight from neutral.
UBS analyst Benjamin
Schachter said the GoogleClick deal "significantly raises the value of AQNT's ad serving business" and upgraded aQuantive to Buy 2 from Neutral 2.
Industry observers speculated over the weekend
that aQuantive, with its Atlas ad-serving network, could become an acquisition candidate, although more of its revenues come from agency AvenueA|Razorfish.