MEDIA: SPOTLIGHT ON ESPOTTING - Espotting deal proves there's still money to be made online.

There's room for manoeuvre in the pay-per-click search market, Alasdair Reid says.

Here's one for nostalgia buffs. It's the story of Sebastian Bishop and James Burrows, a creative pairing at Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe, who leave to set up a dotcom company, which, after a couple of years, they sell for pounds 135 million. Both, naturally enough, become multimillionaires in the process. Jammy gits, is the immediate reaction in polite ad industry circles; though language in some quarters is rather less moderate.

But the spooky thing about this big deal is that fact that it didn't happen in those far off, dangerously distended days of the dotcom bubble.

Unless we are very much mistaken, or the press release was delayed three years in the post, the deal actually happened last week.

Which is curious. This sort of thing just doesn't happen any more, does it? Or do we see another boom on the horizon?

The company in question is Espotting Media, which Bishop and Burrows founded along with Daniel Ishag, its chief executive going into the deal. The company they're selling to is a rival pay-per-click search engine company FindWhat.com.

Actually, the deal was described as a merger, which they can just about get away with, especially as the two companies weren't really direct rivals.