Facebook has bought a company that can help it with its new video ads

Jul 3, 2014 08:59 GMT  ·  By

Facebook has acquired LiveRail, a company that helps improve video ad placing on web pages, making sure these are actually relevant.

The service also provides marketers with a real-time bidding platform if they're looking to place ads on online videos.

The use Facebook would have for this company is pretty obvious considering its slow integration of video ads into the platform, something that they’ve been talking about for years. Having some additional technology to help target the ads better is certainly going to help Facebook.

“We believe that LiveRail, Facebook and the premium publishers it serves have an opportunity to make video ads better and more relevant for the hundreds of millions of people who watch digital video every month. More relevant ads will be more interesting and engaging to people watching online video, and more effective for marketers too. Publishers will benefit as well because more relevant ads will help them make the most out of every opportunity they have to show an ad,” said Facebook’s Brian Boland, vice president of ads product marketing and Atlas.

Boland has explained that LiveRail ultimately offers a complete advertising solution for video publishers and that it already works with the likes of the Major League Baseball, ABC Family, Dailymotion and others.

Facebook’s exec expressed his excitement for the future of video publishers and marketers. “We believe that LiveRail’s excellent product – known in the industry as a video supply-side platform or SSP – and Facebook’s expertise with relevancy, delivery and measurement will help us make video advertising much better for everyone,” said Boland.

For its part, LiveRail is really happy to be joining Facebook. After seven years of hard work, the company has managed to become one of the world’s largest programmatic platforms for video publishers, delivering over 7 billion video ads each month.

Mark Trefgarne, one of the co-founders, has said that LiveRail shares a vision about the future of advertising with Facebook. “They believed, as we do, that publishers deserve a new generation of audience-aware advertising technology,” he writes.

The deal marks the beginning of a new chapter for LiveRail, Trefgarne added.

The company is led by Mark Trefgarne (CEO) and Andrei Dunca (CTO) and has its headquarters in San Francisco, with additional offices in New York, London, and Romania.

The financial terms of the deal have not been revealed, but considering the size of LiveRail and the use Facebook has for it, it’s likely that the social media giant shelled out quite a bit of money.