Audience development startup Alphabird has made a number of acquisitions over the last few years, from social video platform Media Social to video distribution platform Castfire. Well add one more to the list: The company has also acquired Australian digital agency Volt Media to expand its presence there.
The Volt Media purchase is actually Alphabird’s second acquisition in the region, as the company bought digital media and advertising firm Ventures in Digital Media (ViDM) last October. The Volt Media acquisition is designed to increase the number of feet on the ground it has in the region as it attempts to offer digital advertising services to U.S. brands in regions where they are underserved.
Volt Media, which was founded in 2011, has a premium video network for in-stream advertising, which it uses to serve video publishers that distribute content in that region. Brands that it represents in Australia include Blip, Dailymotion, Break Media, Heavy, CollegeHumor and the UFC.
“If you look at markets like Australia, you have firms representing U.S. publishers in those markets,” Alphabird president Alex Rowland told me by phone. “[Buying] Volt became a pretty logical way to expand into that market.”
As part of the deal, Volt Media employees will join the Alphabird Australia team and will join its existing Sydney operations. Willie Pang, who joined as part of the ViDM acquisition, will head up all operations in the region. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
For Alphabird, the acquisition will not only give it a larger presence in Australia, but it will serve as a springboard to other markets in the Asia-Pacific region. Rowland said that over the course of 2013 the company would be looking to expand more aggressively into other countries in the region. That means using Sydney as a base, but it could also mean expanding through other acquisitions over time.
Alphabird is a vertically integrated digital marketing company with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London and Sydney. Alphabird’s suite of publisher solutions enables web and mobile publishers to manage and optimize their audience development, content, data and monetization initiatives. The AlphaBird investor group is led by Joe Abrams. Abrams co-founded Intermix in 1998, the predecessor company to MySpace, which was sold to News Corp. in 2005 for $580 million. In 1983, Abrams co-founded The Software Toolworks, Inc.,...
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