Yahoo! to acquire BlueLithium

Posted September 4th, 2007 at 4:05 pm by Todd Teresi, Yahoo! Publisher Network

 5 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

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

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5 Comments Add your own

gag | September 4th, 2007 at 7:57 pm

BlueLithium sounds cool

Stanley Wong | September 4th, 2007 at 7:58 pm

Congratulations, this is great move at a good price for Blue Lithium considering the multi-billion dollar acquisition of Doubleclick by Google. In light of this deal, Google overpaid.

Alexis Kauffmann | September 9th, 2007 at 1:54 pm

Anything that helps us advertisers get free from Google’s dominance is welcome! Blue Lithium is truly a great company, nice buy.

Floyd | September 13th, 2007 at 1:27 pm

Online ads will continue to be an opportunity I largely ignore as a web browser for several reasons.

1) “Junk ads”, ads that take you someplace just to get your personal information, or make you browse through 100 webpages while offering nothing but scams and hidden “opt-ins”. My experience has been that I am most likely to encounter a “bad site” when I click on seemingly innocuous ads. Sponsored Ads are the worst offenders, usually.

2) Awareness builder ads just tick me off. The ad takes up real estate, and if you are fool enough to click on it, you get to a corpoarte site that either has no information, or is so graphics intensive it locks up your computer. 99.9% of the time these are irrelevant to me as a consumer in the first place, so they doubly aggrevate. Triple that aggrevation if they are flashing, animated, or low in or out of their space, obscuring or distracting my content. it actually creates a negative impression for me of the company/product in question. Forced viewing of the ads, such as before, or on top of the content I want will often give me a mental note to not visit that site, and find the same content elsewhere.

3) 99% of the time, I am NOT shopping on the net. Ads for ways to spend more money I don’t have. Ads trying to get me to do something I’m not out to do rankle me too.

4) Irrelevance of the ad to me. 99% of the ads I’ve encountered in 10 years of surfing have not been anything interesting as far as a product or service.
I’d rather see ads for places and services I know, like and trust over and over than for someone shotgunning me with junk.

So, until you can find a way for ME to customize my ad experience very specifically, it won’t matter how *much* junk you can put out on the net, it will still all be junk, unusued by me, money wasted by advertisers on Yahoo. Congrats on your ability to put more crap ads on the net, but until you can show me the ads I want, it’s all just more crap.

Firelead | October 2nd, 2007 at 11:18 am

I’m a huge fan of Blue Lithium and have been a client of theirs. I am excited by this acquisition and look forward to the possibilities that will come from it.
-Mike