Ad exchange adBrite shut down earlier this year, but its technology isn’t disappearing entirely — self-serve ad-buying company SiteScout is announcing that it has acquired “certain intellectual property assets” that were developed by adBrite.
Neither the financial terms of the deal nor the specific assets involved are being disclosed. This is purely an IP purchase, SiteScout says — it isn’t hiring any adBrite team members.
When I spoke to SiteScout CEO Paul Mokbel about the deal, he said he isn’t getting into the ad exchange business (exchanges work primarily with publishers, while ad-buying platforms like SiteScout work with advertisers), and instead, his company is “cherry picking different components to integrate into our stack.” He predicted that we’ll start “seeing the fruit of this acquisition” in the next quarter or two, but it also sounds like the company is still figuring out exactly what it’s going to do — in Mokbel’s words, “It’s definitely a win for us, and it’s going to take some time to position it properly.”
He added that he was particularly impressed by adBrite’s ad-serving code, which he described as “phenomenal.”
Mokbel said adBrite had a lot of funding with which to develop its technology (more than $40 million, according to CrunchBase). He didn’t draw the comparison directly, but later in our conversation he noted that SiteScout is entirely bootstrapped, and it now has eight-figure annual revenue — I heard last fall that its revenue for the past year had been $20 million.