David Friedberg paid $72 million upfront for D-Mark, an audio advertising platform, with potential earnouts reaching $1.2 billion. The deal went south into a years-long lawsuit after the speaker warned it was a bad bet on a dying radio market, but Eric Schmidt pushed ahead anyway.
I did a few acquisitions and found a few companies. One was called D-Mark that we turned into kind of this radio advertising business. You could go to AdWords and click on audio ads and create an audio ad, then it would play in-stream in radio stations and you could see the impressions and all this stuff.
That's not a thing now, right? That didn't, that didn't end up becoming part of Apple.
It stayed for a long time. There ended up being a really nasty lawsuit. They thought it was worth $1 billion. I mean, the whole thing was crazy how we negotiated the deal. So it ended up being like $72 million upfront cash payment, a $50 million milestone payment if they hit a bunch of technical milestones, and then up to $1.2 billion in earnouts based on the advertising revenue generated from all these stations. And I didn't want to do the deal. And I told Eric Schmidt, I'm like, look, I don't think we should do this deal. And Eric said, we have to be in radio. It's a $60 billion market. Pushed the whole thing through despite my push against it. We did the deal. We ended up in this nasty lawsuit that lasted for years.
