One of the great annoyances about online stock-quote services is that they’re
really good at providing historical data until a company gets bought.
Then, it all disappears.
I’ve been reading all the press about the "nosebleed
price" that Google is paying for DoubleClick, and so I asked myself
how it compares to DCLK’s valuation at the height of the dotcom bubble.
This is not an easy thing to find out. But a December 1999 article from Smart
Money has DCLK trading at $216.50 per share, pre-split; and an August 1998
article from internetnews.com
puts DCLK’s fully-diluted market capitalization at $696.45 million at a share
price of $48.38.
Which means that DoubleClick was worth pretty much exactly $3.1 billion in
December 1999 – which is the same price that Google is paying today.
So "nosebleed" might be right. But it’s not unprecedented.