It has been a few months since we’ve seen Yahoo! Make any major purchases, which is somewhat surprising given the fact that they got a massive cash infusion from the Alibaba IPO. It was recently announced, however, that they have made quite a significant purchase, and all in cash. BrightRoll, which is a programmatic video platform is their latest acquisition, and it looks like it is going to be a very smart move for the tech giant.
BrightRoll is already a profitable company, and they are estimating that in this year along they will clear $100 million in revenues. Even just looking at this from an investment purchase, they will be able to recoup their money in about 6.5 years, and that is without any improvements in the company. It can be expected that under the Yahoo banner, BrightRoll will certainly only grown and improve.
CEO Marissa Mayer said, “We say that video is a display 2.0 because we believe it can reinvent and replace the branded banner advertisement. Video, along with mobile, social and native, represents a new format of online advertising that has the potential to help us transform and modernize Yahoo’s display business and return it to growth.”
BrightRoll currently powers video ads for 87 of the AdAge top 100 US advertisers, which is extremely attractive. They also serve more video ads in the US than any other platform, according to a comScore report. With thousands of sites and apps using BrightRoll, they serve up around two billion requests per day.
The bottom line here is that Yahoo! Has just made itself the leader in video ads, which is likely going to help them long into the future.
