AOL has acquired video ad exchange Adap.tv for $405 million dollars in cash and stock.
Adap.tv´s revenue growth has surpassed 100% in each of the last three years, and last year it supported approximately 26,000 campaigns across 9,500 websites. The company offers (on the buy side) dynamic bidding and ad targeting, including RTB; and (on the sell side) yield management services to video publishers.
This is AOL’s biggest deal since Tim Armstrong became CEO in 2009.
This latest deal is about building out a set of ad technologies to better compete with Google and to offer marketers and agencies the ability to buy online video ads on a real-time basis. “Two trends are prevalent in the video space right now — the movement from linear television to online video and the shift from manual transactions to programmatic media buying,” Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL, said in a statement.
Adap.tv is one of a handful of mature companies, alongside YuMe, Tremor Media, TubeMogu and Videology that are seizing the online video advertising opportunity.
After the deal closes, the combined businesses will double AOL’s existing video ad revenue according to Amstrong.