“Yahoo Inc. said it is acquiring mobile app analytics provider Flurry Inc. in a bid to boost advertising revenue from smartphones,” Douglas MacMillan reports for The Wall Street Journal. “Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. The Internet portal has agreed to pay more than $200 million for Flurry, according to a person familiar with the transaction.”
“The deal marks one of the largest acquisitions by Chief Executive Marissa Mayer and her boldest push yet into mobile advertising, a $32.7 billion market dominated by Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.,” MacMillan reports. “Founded in 2005, Flurry creates tools to help marketers determine which of their mobile ads work the best with iPhone and Android users. The company gathers data from around 540,000 mobile apps, according to its website.”
“Mobile represents one of Ms. Mayer’s best opportunities to increase ad revenue and deliver on her promises to serve super-targeted ads alongside the company’s growing array of digital content. Some advertisers’ perception of Yahoo as an aging relic of an earlier Web era may not carry over to smartphones, where most companies are still experimenting with new approaches to marketing,” MacMillan reports. “Yahoo has amassed more than 450 million monthly users of its mobile apps, which include Yahoo Weather, Yahoo News Digest and smartphone versions of its email and Flickr services. It has begun selling ads inside some of these apps, though revenue from mobile is still too small to break out in its quarterly earnings.”
MacDailyNews Note: Yahoo Weather is soon to lose millions of the very best users, though: Why Apple dumped Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo for The Weather Channel in iOS 8 Weather app – June 20, 2014
“Flurry works with 8,000 mobile publishers, such as news outlet the Guardian and game maker Sega Corp., who use the service to sell banner ads within apps,” MacMillan reports. “Yahoo’s share [of the digital ad market] is estimated at well under 1%. Flurry’s 115 employees will join Yahoo, and the unit will continue to sell all of its existing ad and analytics services, Mr. Burke said.”
Read more in the full article here.
Lady in red got balls…
This is a great move for Yahoo.
How come the MDN note is so jacked up and unreadable in their very own iOS app? Weird.
Wow, that’s a lot to pay for a Flurry. The last McDonald’s I went to sold me one with little M&M’s for less than two bucks.
——RM