Yahoo! has announced that its has signed an agreement to acquire BrightRoll, a leading programmatic video advertising platform across desktop, mobile and connected TV for approximately $640 million in cash. The acquisition sees the merging of Yahoo's premium desktop and mobile video advertising inventory with BrightRoll's programmatic video platform and publisher relationships to bring substantial value to advertisers on both platforms.
According to Yahoo, BrightRoll is a large, growing and profitable business with net revenues expected to exceed $100 million this year and expects the transaction to enhance its EBITDA. BrightRoll powers digital video advertising for the world's largest brands and agencies, including 87 of the AdAge Top 100 US advertisers, all of the top 15 advertising agencies, and all 10 of the leading demand-side platforms, said Yahoo.
The company's technology provides an elegant solution, aggregating high-quality publishers together into a unified network and utilizing programmatic advertising and aggregation to allow real-time buying on the largest set of online video advertising inventory available.
Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO
Video, along with mobile, social, and native, is driving a surge in digital advertising. Here at Yahoo, video is one of the largest growth opportunities, and BrightRoll is a terrific, strategic and financially compelling fit for our video advertising business. As with every acquisition, we have been extremely thoughtful about our approach to the video advertising space. This acquisition will accelerate the growth of both companies - we can help BrightRoll scale to even more advertisers globally and they can bring their tremendous platform offering to Yahoo's advertisers. The combination builds positive momentum for Yahoo's broader display advertising business in 2015.
Tod Sacerdoti, BrightRoll CEO and Founder
We believe the next step for programmatic video advertising as an industry is to extend and standardize globally, make cross-device buying simple and measurable, and complement and integrate with TV. We are excited to join Yahoo to materially advance efforts in each of these areas. We're still in the early innings as an industry, and together, BrightRoll and Yahoo are committed to the vision of helping grow the entire video advertising ecosystem.
