Yahoo Purchases BrightRoll For $640M, Becomes A Video Advertising Force

Yahoo acquires BrightRoll for $640 million. They have just announced the news about purchasing the programatic video advertising platform today, after a deal was a reportedly in the works for a price of something around $700 million.

Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer has taken to Tumblr today to announce the news about BrightRoll in a blog post. She begins it with, “I’m thrilled to announce that we are acquiring BrightRoll, a leading programmatic video advertising platform.” She claims that video advertising is one of the Yahoo’s growth businesses, along with mobile, social, and native.

Mayer also calls video one of the company’s four strategic pillars along with search, digital magazines, and communications. She claims video is ‘display 2.0’.

We say that video is display 2.0 because we believe it can reinvent and replace the branded banner advertisement. Video, along with mobile, social, and native, represents a new format of online advertising that has the potential to help us transform and modernize Yahoo’s display business and return it to growth.

Yahoo acquires BrightRoll for $640 million. Mayer claims that online video advertising is becoming increasingly fragmented across millions of sites and mobile apps, and that’s where BrightRoll comes in.

BrightRoll provides an effective solution aggregating high-quality publishers together into a unified network and utilizing programmatic advertising to allow real-time buying on the largest set of online video advertising inventory available. BrightRoll’s approach not only benefits advertisers and publishers, but also improves experiences for consumers, through better quality, more relevant advertisements.

BrightRoll was created in 2006 by Tod Sacerdoti, who is still the CEO of the company, yet he may have a different role soon. Mayer says, “I’ve spent time with Tod Sacerdoti and his leadership team and I cannot wait to have him, his vision, and his team here at Yahoo.”

BrightRoll is a profitable company, and Mayer says they will make Yahoo the largest video advertising platform. BrightRoll has a lot of credentials, which she points out in her post:

BrightRoll powers digital video advertising for the world’s largest brands and agencies, including 87 of the AdAge Top 100 US advertisers, all of the top 15 advertising agencies, and all 10 of the leading demand-side platforms.

BrightRoll served more video ads and reached more consumers in the US in 2014 than any other platform, according to comScore.

Tens of thousands of sites and apps send approximately two billion requests per day to BrightRoll to monetize the inventory they worked hard to create.

Yahoo acquires BrightRoll for $640 million. Do you think Yahoo’s purchase will make them an online video advertising force to be reckoned with?