In their largest acquisition to date, Google bought Doubleclick, the purveyor of big media online ads.  Rumors had pegged Doubleclick being the target of Microsoft, so at the very least this was a take away play.

If anyone thought that Google wasn’t serious about controlling online advertising, they’re sure to be convinced now. 

For publishers, this will be an interesting play, as Google will most probably at some point start to make use of their Pay Per Action model in the Doubleclick space.  This again means an even speedier demise for pageviews, if they weren’t completely dead already.  It also means that large publishers will be introduced to the PPA model sooner than anyone expected, which may have interesting affects in the area of online revenue.

For smaller publishers, the effect probably won’t be immediately apparent, as Doubleclick doesn’t really play in that space.  However, we can expect them to have a large effect on the future direction of online advertising, so we should all be keeping an eye on them.

Another interesting non-development is that I have yet to hear anyone mention the Monopoly word.   If Doubleclick had gone to Microsoft, we certainly would have heard the usual moans about their plans for global domination.  In fact, Google represents a bigger monopolistic threat when one looks solely at the online advertising space.