By Adam E. John
Yahoo, itself in the market to be acquired, just finished doing a bit of shopping for itself. The company has bought Interclick, for around $270 million cash, at $9 per share.
Interclick, founded in 2006, offers proprietary data-valuation capabilities as part of its Open Segment Manager (OSM) platform . The company helps marketers build and manage targeting audiences, and help scale behavioral targetting in digital advertising, using its OSM tools to deal with issues like sparsity, noise, rare events.
With its acquisition Yahoo will acquire data targeting capabilities, optimization technologies, as well as a team experienced in selling audiences across disparate sources of pooled supply. Yahoo faces a problem that plagues several publishers in the digital business – online ad-sellers buy up ad space on Yahoo sites, and then resell them to advertisers with a premium, a practice that somewhat approximates the practice of ticket scalping at times.
OSM aggregates and organizes billions of data points from third party providers, and can provide valuable actionable statistics. Besides, Interclick has been working closely with Yahoo for the past few years, and is no stranger to the website’s inventory, data, or audience.
The acquisition is expected to be complete by early next year, subject to the usual customary regulations.
(Adam E. John is consulting editor with techtaffy.com. He can be reached at adam@techtaffy.com)