Yahoo Bolsters Mobile Analytics With Flurry Purchase

Yahoo has acquired mobile analytics startup Flurry (No, it is not an ice cream) as the Internet giant moves to strengthen its position in the mobile advertising business.

Flurry is a six year old company that uses analytics to help target adverts at consumers. It does this by monitoring app activity on more than half 1.4 billion mobile devices around the world. Yahoo says for example that Flurry sees 5.5 billion app sessions per day, and 8,000 publishers monetize with Flurry.

Flurry Deal

“Yahoo’s growth in mobile traffic comes from great people and great products,” said Scott Burke, Yahoo’s senior vice president of advertising technology. “Flurry’s success is the result of years of committed investment by a passionate team to create an indispensable platform for mobile developers. We want to harness our collective innovative spirit and bolster the mobile ecosystem by providing developers the analytics and monetisation solutions to drive their success.”

Flurry meanwhile indicated that it will have a lot more resources to help it grow.

“As part of Yahoo, Flurry will continue to serve the application developer community in the way we always have, only better,” said Simon Khalaf, President and CEO, Flurry. “With Yahoo, we will have access to more resources to speed up the delivery of great products that can help app developers build better apps, reach the right users, and explore new revenue opportunities. Over the last six years we have accomplished a lot on our own, but with Yahoo we are in an even better position to achieve our joint goals.”

Khalaf explained that time spent on mobile devices by the average US consumer has risen to 2 hours and 42 minutes per day in 2014. He also said that 86 percent of that time is spent in apps, and about 60 percent of that time is spent in applications built by independent app developers

“Today, Flurry is entering a new phase of its life,” wrote Khalaf. “I am excited to announce that we have reached an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo and expect to be joining Yahoo very soon.”

The importance of acquisitions to Yahoo was underlined recently by its disappointing financial results, when it said it would retain a larger than expected stake in the hugely valuable Alibaba e-commerce giant.

For the second quarter ending 30 June, Yahoo revealed that its profit had fallen 18 percent to $272 million (£159m). There was also bad news on the sales side, with revenues down 3 percent to $1.08 billion (£633). CEO Marissa Mayer blamed the decline mostly on digital display advertising, which plunged 8 percent in the second quarter.

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