Sunday, November 16, 2014

Why Yahoo Needs Its $640 Million Acquisition of BrightRoll

While many people have grown tired of Yahoo's seemingly endless stream of disparate acquisitions, its latest purchase addresses several critical needs of the core advertising business. While BrightRoll's business certainly helps boost earnings and provides Yahoo with a complementary offering in video, a recent AdAge article highlights how the network provides the publisher with the credibility and platform to bolster its network business, which is where Yahoo will need to excel if it wants to be a leading player in the quickly evolving digital media industry.

With Yahoo's O&O activity showing few signs of promise compared to its audience size, the publisher has intelligently been transitioning more towards a network type of model despite only 10-12% of its display revenue reportedly coming from this function. As Yahoo combines its audience, data, etc. with varying technologies and programmatic capabilities it will start to become a more attractive strategic partner for large advertisers who are looking for similarly large firms to help them simply make sense of a fragmented and complex digital advertising space and make the most of their spend. As both a network and recently with its exchange, BrightRoll has proven to be a strong partner with advertisers and it will be interesting to see if Yahoo is able to properly leverage this new asset along with its other recently acquired capabilities.

Source: http://adage.com/article/digital/yahoo-bought-ad-tech-firm-brightroll-640-million/295827/

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