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.