Google's Mad Dash

"We have always believed in, and tirelessly pursued, the idea that serving relevant, unintrusive ads would best serve our advertisers in the long term."

But Google's approach of serving up discreet ads may be much more suited for search than display advertising. In search, advertisers pay only when users click on an ad. But in display, advertisers pay each time the ad is served up to the attention of a user, even if it's not clicked on.

Indeed, display ads have been growing increasingly animated and hard to ignore over the years since that's precisely what advertisers want. DoubleClick, a pioneer in the field of the incredibly-annoying-yet-hard-to-ignore field of popup-advertising, should know all about this.

Investors should hope it doesn't take anything as strenuous as another annual strategic review for Google to discover this aspect of the display market.