Google’s 2010 Bill for Acquisitions: $1.8 Billion

For anyone not following Google very closely, it would seem that the company is on a somewhat of a acquisition spree of late. It’s buying a new company once a week most of the time and it has made several large acquisitions this year. Google only spent $148 million on the 11 companies it managed to buy in the second quarter of 2010, according to PaidContent which cites Google’s quarterly financial report.

It must be noted that the figure includes just the smaller companies it bought and the transactions that were completed, not just announced. On average, Google paid about $14 million for each startup it acquired, though there’s no way to know how the money was divided. The company regularly buys small companies, almost always for the talent. The engineers join Google’s existing teams and the products are discontinued.

Google spent a very similar sum on small acquisitions in the first quarter of the year as well, paying $145 million for nine companies. But these figures don’t include the big transactions. Google finally managed to close the AdMob acquisition deal after the US regulators approved it. The search giant paid $681 million for the mobile advertising company.

Earlier this year, Google also completed an acquisition it announced last year, paying $123 million for the video technology company On2. It later used the VP8 video codec developed by On2 as the basis for the open-source WebM video format.

Another major acquisition is yet to be approved by the government regulators. Google recently announced its intentions to buy flight-information data provider ITA Software for $700 million. If the deal goes through, Google’s acquisition spending figure will rise quite a bit. So far, it all adds up to about $1.8 billion to be spent by the company this year. Of course, there are two more quarters to go so the number should increase significantly by the end of 2010. With $30 billion in cash, though, Google can’t buy companies fast enough to equal what it adds to its coffers each quarter.