Advertisers seek essentially three different outcomes when they buy display (or graphical) ads online — either to build brand awareness, promote something new, or drive some kind of transaction (a lead, a sale, a new customer). The latter, known as performance marketing, has been exploding online over the past year because it's typically served around social media content, where there's no shortage of inventory.

It's an area in which our teams have been working feverishly to provide better solutions. Their jobs just got easier.

Yahoo! just entered an agreement to acquire BlueLithium, one of the largest and fastest growing online global ad networks with a stable of direct response products and tools for advertisers and publishers. BlueLithium runs the fifth largest ad network in the U.S. and the second largest in the U.K., providing access to valuable audiences and increasing our ability to sell performance-based campaigns both on and off our network.

With more than 100 employees, including computer scientists and researchers, BlueLithium is known for providing powerful data analytics to help customers get the most out of their campaigns as well as impressive behavioral targeting capabilities. They provide the dashboards and insights our performance customers have been asking for — capabilities that have been a bit of an Achilles heel for us.

By acquiring BlueLithium, we'll be accelerating our advertiser, product, and engineering roadmaps and will be in position to better compete in the burgeoning performance marketing arena.

This is the logical next step as we build what we believe will be one of the world's leading online display ad networks, which includes inventory on Yahoo!’s owned and operated properties, our affiliate network (our partnerships with eBay, Comcast, and our consortium of nearly 400 newspapers), the Yahoo! Publisher Network, and the Right Media Exchange.

This is an important milestone for Yahoo!. As Sue Decker said in the press release, "…this transaction demonstrates our commitment to increasing our investments in areas which can most contribute to Yahoo!’s long-term success.”

We look forward to welcoming the BlueLithium team aboard and benefiting from their expertise.

Todd Teresi
SVP, Yahoo! Publisher Network