“We have reached a definitive agreement to acquire Flurry, the industry leader in mobile analytics,” Yahoo said in a blog post.
It said the purchase ”reinforces our commitment to building and
supporting useful, inspiring and beautiful mobile applications and
monetization solutions.”Flurry is one of the biggest mobile ad firms in operation with a reach so vast it tracks more mobile phones than Google GOOGL -1.16% or Facebook. Such an acquisition would boost Yahoo’s ambitions to be a “mobile first” company, after it has struggled to match the growth of mobile ad revenues at rivals Facebook and Google.
Yahoo and Flurry “can now start to battle Facebook and Google for mobile ad dollars,” said Raj Aggarwal, CEO of app analytics firm Localytics. The key is in bringing one of the world’s largest content companies and mobile ad networks together to connect inventory and demand, he added.
Yahoo recently said it was getting 450 million unique monthly visitors per month on mobile, but it failed to report revenue from mobile ads, leaving a big question mark over Yahoo’s ability to take a slice of the growing mobile advertising market. Gartner forecasts mobile ads will be worth $42 billion in 2017.
The prospect of high-speed auctions and targeted ads also drove Twitter’s acquisition of MoPub in September 2013 for $350 million.
“With Yahoo, we will have access to more resources to speed up the delivery of great products that can help app developers build better apps, reach the right users for their apps and more importantly, make money from ads that look great and blend into the app experience,” Flurry’s CEO and founder Simon Khalaf said in a blog post today.
Flurry, the subject of a Forbes magazine profile last year, is on the forefront of so-called real-time biding, essentially hyper-fast auctions for ad space run by algorithms.
It recently set up an ad exchange to run such auctions on mobile phones, which targets individuals rather than groups of people. Flurry’s core strength here is an analytics tool that it gives away to app developers.
Close to half a million apps on iOS and Android use Flurry’s tool to track how people are using their services, and in exchange, Flurry collects details about individual users such as age, gender, interests and languages, and feeds that back to advertisers.
Flurry is able to build rich, constantly-shifting profiles of individuals by cross referencing all the behavioral data it collects from the different apps it’s embedded in. On average, Flurry’s analytics tool is monitoring seven apps per phone.
Flurry has said till now that it was aiming for an IPO, which Khalaf described as “funding and not an exit.”
“The focus the company right now is growth,” he said in an August 2013 interview. “The market is growing and we have to keep up with it. This is an opportunity of a lifetime.”
Some fast facts about Flurry:
