Behavioural Targeting Buy for Online Ad Firm

LA-based ad solutions firm the Rubicon Project has acquired behavioural targeting specialist Others Online, aiming to expand its ad optimization platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Rubicon Project launched in early 2007 to automate and optimize the buying and selling of online advertising, and to date has optimized more than 310 billion ads across 20,000 web sites, raising $33m in venture funding in a highly competitive market of its own, and expanding both geographically and in the US through acquisition.

Jordan Mitchell, CEO and founder of Others Online, will become the Rubicon Project's Vice President of Data Intelligence.

According to Frank Addante, Rubicon Project CEO and founder, 'There are two new challenges facing the online ad industry; audience and data fragmentation. Advertisers need to connect directly with their audiences. Fragmentation has made it difficult for them to efficiently reach their audiences. Further, the recent growth in the number of data companies in the market has created fragmentation at the data level. The acquisition of Others Online will help us solve the data fragmentation challenge to the benefit of everyone connected to the Rubicon Project platform.'

Mitchell says the online ad marketplace is 'fraught with inefficiency, lack of standardization, varying data quality and overlap issues' and explains: 'We were looking to partner with a company that was going to use our technology on a massive global scale, and we found that indeed with the Rubicon Project. Together we will create tremendous opportunity for premium publishers by making sure every impression generates them the most revenue possible.'

Web sites are at www.rubiconproject.com and www.othersonline.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.