Flurry for Yahoo!

21/07/2014

Yahoo! said that it is acquiring mobile app analytics provider Flurry in a bid to boost advertising revenue from smartphones. The company has made no secret about its ambitions and advances in mobile. CEO Marissa Mayer's words, saying that Yahoo! is a "mobile first company." The companies did not disclose financial details but reports have cited a purchase price of "several hundred million dollars."

The deal marks one of the largest acquisitions by Mayer, and one of her boldest attempt to bring Yahoo! into mobile advertising, where the $32.7 billion market is dominated by Google and Facebook.

Founded in 2005, Flurry creates tools to help marketers determine which of their mobile ads work the best with iPhone and Android users. Flurry works with 8,000 mobile publishers who use the service to sell banner ads within apps. After the acquisition, all of Flurry's 115 employees will join Yahoo!, and the unit will continue to sell all of its existing ad and analytics services.

"These relationships will give Yahoo! a bigger mobile footprint and more opportunities to pitch to its advertisers," said Scott Burke, Yahoo!'s Senior Vice President of Advertising.

Although Yahoo! in considered an aging "relic" from the early web era, the company had amassed more than 450 million monthly users from its mobile apps that include: Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! News Digest and smartphone versions of its email and Flickr services.