Back in the 1990s, a group of online ad players -- like Mediaplex, DoubleClick and 24/7 -- sported multibillion dollar market caps. Of course, it did not take long for the bubble to burst.

Funny enough, the conventional wisdom was that we would never see these kinds of valuations again.

Well, never say never.

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) is going to pay $6 billion for aQuantive Inc. (NASDAQ: AQNT) and Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is buying DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

We are going back to the future. So what does this all mean?

I had a chance to interview Dana Ghavami, who is the CEO of CheckM8:

How about some background on your company?

CheckM8 has been in the business of online ad technologies for seven years. We service many leading online publishers and are backed by leading institutional investors, including SoftBank and CCI of Dentsu. The company is US-based, with offices in New York and R&D facilities in Israel, in addition to sales and support offices in the UK, Spain, and Sweden. Customers include leading online publishers: Business Week, Nielsen, Sports Illustrated, Terra Networks, Washington Post, amongst many others. Our first product, called the Rich Media Manager, released four years ago, allows publishers to produce and manage premium ad formats for maximum-CPM opportunities online. Our flagship AdVantage product released two years ago allows publishers to manage their end-to-end ad, inventory, rich media needs in a single platform.

Does the Microsoft deal for aQuantive make sense in light of the high valuation?

We're looking at an industry that's going to drive $60B of advertising by 2010 and be the future medium of consumers and advertisers. So, if I had a major stake (like Microsoft) and the competition (Google) was one step ahead, I'd pull that kind of trigger too in hopes of having one of the seats at the small and priceless roundtable in the not-so distant future. These companies are looking at making multiples of what they're paying today in the foreseeable future.

Do you think we'll see more consolidation in the space, such as with ValueClick and private companies?

Very likely. However, the big media companies are increasingly looking for integrity and independence with their digital ad infrastructure and rapidly running out of options. At some point, there won't be enough established
and proven solutions to manage their critical needs and building their own solutions is not a practical option. Therefore, the need for reputable and trustworthy independent solutions will continue to exist.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.