Ad Tech Mergers & Acquisitions Tracker

This page tracks relevant and recent ad tech mergers and acquisitions, from its very beginnings in the late 90s. A few notes on the methodology on what gets included and what doesn’t:

  • Companies must be primarily focused on, or especially relevant to digital marketing and ad delivery.  This is why you won’t see things like the Unica or Netezza acquisitions in this list (which are used in the marketing world, but not built for marketing purposes specifically), but you will see things like the Dentsu / Aegis merger.
  • This list is also focused on the largest and / or most important ad tech acquisitions and not necessarily meant as a comprehensive list of every acquisition in the digital space.  There is significant activity with small and local firms that aren’t well covered in the press, but are tracked by companies like the Jordan Edmiston Group, as well as Signal Hill, who distributes comprehensive and free quarterly reports on the digital media space.
  • I’ve provided a source link for each story which will note the date, companies involved, and purchase price if disclosed.  Funding information is taken from Crunchbase profiles, unless specifically noted in the article.
  • If you have feedback on missing or mis-categorized companies, please feel free to reach out to me as noted in the About page on this site.

Also, be sure to see my analysis on the history of ad tech acquisitions.

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21 comments

  5. You forgot to mention Dentsu buying Innovation Interactive in 2010, which included 360i, Search Ignite, and Netmining. Then, only to have Search Ignite and Netmining buy themselves back under IgnitionOne. With IgnitionOne later acquiring Knotice (a DMP) and Human Demand (a mobile DSP) in 2014.

  6. Thanks! The Search Ignite / Netmining was missing, but I do have the others! Remember, you can use the search box in the upper right corner of the table to quickly see results on other pages. The whole dataset is over 600 rows and I only have the top 100 on the first page. Innovation is under 360i, and Knotice and Human Demand is in there already.

  8. Thanks Jack – can’t believe I missed MoPub, that was a big one! And sorry the table isn’t sorting that well, the problem is I have a mix of text and numbers in that column to call out transactions that were estimated vs. disclosed, when it was a merger vs. an acquisition, as well as situations where a public company was acquired and the concept of venture funding isn’t really relevant. Because of that the table sorts as text instead of numbers. Sorry about that!

  9. Hi –

    Date sorts are wrong too. 🙁 Sorting by month. I think if you reverse the date you’ll be in better shape (e.g. 2015-09-06), assuming you can’t make it a numeric/date rather than text sort.

    Nice info, and nice site.

    thx –

    Michael

  10. Thanks Michael, I think there was just one date that was formatted incorrectly and messing up the sort. Try it now and I think you’ll have better results!

  12. Thanks Boris! I completely missed BlackArrow; I’m surprised there wasn’t more press on that one. Added!

  16. Thanks for the tip – I did know about those acquisitions from Gravity4, they just seemed like very small shops. Essentially an acqui-hire or purchase of the technology out of bankruptcy. For a variety of reasons they just didn’t seem material based on the limited information I could find about the acquired company and therefore didn’t include them.

  18. Hi Harshal,

    You got it – thanks for the catch! Quite the drama with Media General / Meredith / Nexstar – would have liked to be a fly on the wall in the Exec Suite there!

    Ben

  20. Hi Priyanka,

    I haven’t purposely limited it to just a particular country or region, though the vast majority of the list is US / EU companies. If you have any I’ve missed in India that are major transactions please let me know.

    Thanks,
    Ben

  21. Thank’s so much for Great insights, looking foreword to second half of 2016. starting to see lot of Chinese groups getting in.

    Note : tables are not working well in safari. best used in IE an FF..

    Cheers

    Kyle

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