Most recently in the news for its executive exodus last week, Yahoo announced on its corporate blog earlier today the acquisition of San Francisco-based Dapper, a startup that specializes in fancy contextual display ads, i.e. ads that take what is happening on a content producer’s website as a cue for what to serve up to a viewer.
Both Yahoo and Google have been working on optimizing contextual display ads for quite some time, and this recent acquisition is Yahoo’s attempt to harness the talent at Dapper, which has also figured out a realtime bidding feature for ads. This is the first Yahoo acquisition since the triumvirate of Koprol, Associated Content and Citizen Sports in May.
From the Yahoo blog:
“Yahoo! is already the largest and most successful force in display advertising, but the strategic addition of Dapper will enable our advertisers and agencies to quickly and easily build dynamic ad creative, leveraging data to automatically show the right product, offer, or message with each impression.”
Dapper has received $3 million in financing from Accel Partners among others, and it’s worth noting that Former Yahoo’er Amit Kumar was formerly product manager at Dapper and currently sits on the Dapper board.
The terms of the acquisition were undisclosed, but we’re guessing the acquisition price was relatively small, between $20 -$30 million. Yahoo stock rose 2.31% today, trading at $14.61 by NASDAQ’s close.
Dapper lets users extract and structure data from around the web, and then create useful services based around this structured information. For example, Dapper allows users to create an RSS feed based on any web site, even if it’s not theirs, or create Flash widgets that display results from queries of specific data sets. Essentially, Dapper allows users to create an API for any website or service, and easily create mashups using it. In addition, Dapper...
Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It has since evolved into a major internet brand with search, content verticals, and other web services. Yahoo! Inc. (Yahoo!), incorporated in 1995, is a global Internet brand. To users, the Company provides owned and operated online properties and services (Yahoo! Properties, Offerings, or Owned and Operated sites). Yahoo! also extends its marketing platform and access to Internet users beyond Yahoo! Properties through its distribution network...
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