AOL Acquires Advertising Company - Desperation sign?

AOL is having serious problems over the possibility of Yahoo becoming an integrating part of Microsoft, ad platform included. The deal would give the two a stand in the fight against Google, seeming more powerful and because of that cutting out the smaller ad-serving companies, such as Time Warner's AOL.

It must not fall behind and right now every employee must be praying that Yahoo! doesn't accept the 'generous' (at least according to Microsoft) offer on their table. It must try, in its turn, to become as impressive as possible, as fast as possible. But that's what it has been trying for the past two years since it was turned from a dialup ISP to an ad platform and the success it had is moderate. It did not manage to become a horse to bet on, in the search market race.

Yesterday, AOL acquired buy.at, UK based, for a sum that is somewhere around 150 billion dollars, according to inside sources that would not be named. Financial terms were, as usual, not disclosed. Buy.at will be added to the four companies it previously bought in the past year, alongside TACODA, ADTECH, Third Screen Media and Quigo, all of which concentrate on the ad serving aspects, as opposed to the attention to retailers that the UK company built a reputation for.

According to Mike Butcher of Tech Crunch UK's sources, "the deal is very much about global expansion of buy.at's expertise, since the UK is now considered a world leader in online marketing and actually ahead of the US in terms of sophistication. Out of total ad-spend, online spend here is proportionately higher than in US."

AOL and Ask.com could be very hurt by the seemingly imminent deal that Microsoft is trying to push. Fortunately for the first, Ask.com's parent firm, IAC, is in the middle of an internal war that doesn't let it react. But will that be enough?