Following a wave of online-ad acquisitions by rivals Google and Microsoft, Yahoo has once again reached into its pockets to ramp up its ad reach by acquiring the privately held global ad network BlueLithium for about $300 million, just months after announcing its purchase of the remaining 80 percent of online ads exchange service Right Media.
Yahoo Publisher Network senior vice president Todd Teresi wrote in a blog post:
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.
According to comScore Media Metrix, BlueLithium is the fifth largest ad network in the US and second largest in the UK with 145 million unique visitors each month. The company uses a so-called behavioral-targeting technology to track individual web users' habits online in order to feed them the ads they are most likely to respond to. The move will help improve Yahoo's sluggish online ad-revenue, which had a 2.3% drop in second-quarter profit in July.