14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo has announced the acquisition of display advertising startup Dapper. The startup focuses on dynamic ads and a bidding technology for display ads. The financial details have not been disclosed but the sell price is said to be in the $20 million to $30 million range.
"Yahoo! has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Dapper, a technology platform providing dynamic display ad creation and optimization," Yahoo announced.
"Yahoo! is already the largest and most successful force in display advertising, but the strategic addition of Dapper will enable our advertisers and agencies to quickly and easily build dynamic ad creative, leveraging data to automatically show the right product, offer, or message with each impression," the announcement continued.
Dapper is a four-year-old startup which focuses on display ads, arguably one of Yahoo's main interest. The company managed to create a few technologies which would make a good asset for Yahoo.
Dapper uses contextual display ads which are served based on the content around them in the websites. Even more interesting, it can also generate display ads on the fly, enabling companies to update them in real-time.
This also enables advertisers to target certain ads at certain websites at any given time. Finally, Dapper also came up with a bidding system for display ads.
The system is similar to the one used by virtually every advertising network out there for text ads.
In fact, much of the features are borrowed from text ads which have proven very popular precisely because they can be customized to certain websites and moments.
Dapper is hardly the only company working on this kind of technology. Google acquired a similar company in the past year. And both Yahoo and Google have been rumored on working on this type of technology.
Eran Shir, Dapper cofounder and CTO also published a rather thorough blog post detailing the sale and the reasons behind it.
"Dapper emerged about four years ago with, I'd like to think, a bold mission statement: 'To put the right content, at the right time, in front of the right user'," Shir said.
When explaining why the company sold, he said that the money, though nice, was not the main reason. Rather, it has to do with scale.
"One important reason has to do with a word I like: Leverage... In display advertising, there's no player with bigger leverage than Yahoo. Being part of Yahoo, we can actually make a dent in what people consider an ad should be," he explained.