Synacor Buys Technorati For Just $3M To Build Out Its Mobile And Ad Tech Business

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. Alongside the official confirmation, Synacor also posted an 8-K form with the price: $3 million in cash.

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.

In its heyday, Technorati raised just over $32 million from investors that included August Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Reid Hoffman. It made $7 million in revenue in 2015, Synacor said. Synacor is publicly traded and has a modest market cap of $51 million.

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.”

Synacor says advertising represented 45% of its Q3 2015 revenues, up 17% year-over-year. Synacor today offers direct sales, ad operations and yield management services.

Technorati will add to that 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.

Synacor is, interestingly, also something of an 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. Other previous acquisitions include web TV startup NimbleTV.