Yet more consolidation underway in the ad tech business, and a resting place for what was once a leading authority for ranking important blogs and other sites online: Synacor, a company that provides monetization services for ISPs, carriers and others that offer content services, has acquired Technorati. The companies should be posting a price for the deal later today, we’ve been told, so we’ll update this post as we learn more.
Technorati, as you might know, was one of the earlier players online, founded in 2002. It made its name initially by tracking top news and blogs by way of traffic as well as general “buzz”, posting the results on a much-watched and influential leaderboard. That product was quietly shuttered in 2014 as part of Technorati’s wider shift to focusing on monetizing services for websites, particularly around programmatic advertising solutions. It’s this latter business that Synacor is buying and integrating into its wider business.
“Advertising is an important growth engine for Synacor,” said Synacor CEO Himesh Bhise in a statement. “In the past year we dramatically improved advertising monetization in line with our strategy to increase value for our customers. Combining Technorati’s publisher network, SmartWrapper header bidding solution, and advertising technology with Synacor’s existing portal network and monetization engine creates a large-scale Media Solutions Platform. We welcome the talented Technorati team, which shares our ethic of being a trusted partner to customers.”
The company says advertising represented 45% of Synacor’s Q3 2015 revenues, up grew 17% year-over-year. Synacor today offers direct sales, ad operations and yield management services. Technorati will add an ad network that currently services some 1,000 publisher customers to the mix covering some 100 million monthly unique visitors, with half of them on mobile. It will also bring new products into the mix: a bidding management solution called “SmartWrapper”; and Contango, a real-time bidding platform covering supply-side platform, exchanges and networks.
“For Technorati, becoming part of Synacor is a logical next step to grow our ad network and our digital advertising solution, SmartWrapper. All of us at Technorati are excited to be joining Synacor and bringing our programmatic advertising platforms to a much broader audience of customers and partners,” said Technorati CEO Shani Higgins in a statement.
Technorati, which raised just over $32 million in its life as a startup from investors that included August Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Reid Hoffman, made $7 million in revenue in 2015, Synacor said. Synacor is publicly traded and has a modest market cap of $52 million.
It’s also something of an interesting acquirer of older Internet icons. It’s also the company that eventually acquired Zimbra, the cloud-based email provider, which passed through a couple of other owners, including Yahoo.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/aFGwAwXXt1A/
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