At one point or another in the past few years, I’d owned shares of:

- aQuantive (acquired by MSFT for $6B)
- 247/RealMedia (acquired by WPP for $649M)
- Doubleclick (taken private for $1.1B - then acquired by Google for $3.1B)
- Fast Click (acquired by Valueclick)

Had Blue Lithium ever gone public, I would have bought up shares, too.   As a former advertising and current new media executive, I knew all of those companies’ products and managers and knew which ones were valuable and which ones were not.

One company I’d never owned remained Valueclick.  I frequently thought of getting in the shares - because sometimes market peers move up and down together - but for whatever reason, I’d stay on the sidelines.   That’s the advice that UBS’s analyst is doling out today:

“Without confidence in our ability to call a bottom to how low revenue growth can fall, we remain on the sidelines and reiterate our neutral rating,” analyst Benjamin Schachter wrote in a note to clients, cutting his price target on ValueClick’s stock to $13 from $20.

I recall thinking of buying when this stock was in the low teens, or $1B, and then seeing it go all the way up to the low $30s, or $3B in market cap.  By then, the music began to slow down, all of Valueclick’s competitors had found a dancing partner.

Then the music stopped: online networks became so passe, media companies began to launch networks themselves… and before you knew it, Valueclick’s opening had vanishes.

I have no clue if Valueclick will slide further down the spiral or find some room to appreciate.  All I know is that Valueclick was overvalued and overhyped at $3B.  But what at $1B?   I just don’t know.  But much the same way that some of the better deals are done in a cool market climate… and let’s face it: we’re in a cool climate now.  Oh, and by cool, I mean sucky.

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