
When the five largest companies in our space have a lot of needs, they tend to pull out the wallet and go shopping. Sometimes they buy their way into partnerships, but often, they simply buy.
Hence my fifth prediction for 2012: Expect Internet M&A to heat up, big time. It’s not just going to be the Big Five who drive this trend, it’ll be a whole mess of players looking to consolidate power and press into the double-digit growth market that is the Internet (and by Internet, I also mean mobile and enterprise, of course). Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson knows how to buy companies and has a data focus, for example. That could mean competition to purchase marketing, ad tech, and data companies like Blue Kai, Quantcast, or MarketShare. MediaBank is on a tear and will be on the lookout for similar kinds of companies. IBM has a deep interest in the marketing tech world, expect Big Blue to make some big moves as well. And Twitter will certainly be flexing its muscles, now that it’s bulked up with nearly a billion in fresh capital.
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