Back in early January, AOL made a $900 million cash offer to acquire Swedish online marketing firm TradeDoubler, hoping to acquire itself a bigger stake in the European online advertising market by combining TradeDoubler with its own Advertising.com. That offer was originally supposed to run through the week of February 19, but the transaction still hasn’t been approved by TradeDoubler shareholders; now, AOL has extended the timeframe of the offer through March 14 in hopes of inking the deal…but has refused to sweeten the pot to overcome opposition.
AOL is currently offering 215 krona for each TradeDoubler share; since news of the offer, shares have been trading above that price as investors anticipated a significant payday. The buyout must be approved by 90 percent of the shareholders in order to go through; TradeDoubler’s top shareholder is the Swedish pension firm Alecta, which reportedly controls 10.01 percent of TradeDoubler and has been opposing AOL’s buyout offer.
Establishing global advertising partnerships is crucial to AOL’s new service model, which replaces a closed-garden subscription-based proprietary service with a free-to-all collection of Internet-based, ad-supported offerings.
