Two new acquisitions underscore how M&A is fuelling ongoing consolidation in the still-growing online video advertising segment.
Video search engine and advertising firm Blinkx is placing new shares representing 1.8 percent of the company to acquire Melville, NY-based search marketing firm Prime Visibility Media Group for $36 million (£22.4 million in cash).
Blinkx says it wants to serve its video results to some of PVMG’s 1.5 billion daily text search queries. PVMG’s text ads claim a CPM of $5 while Blinkx says its untargeted sponsored video ads boast a $13 CPM.
PVMG’s network claims an average of 600 publishers and 350 publishers. The company lost $389,511 last year on revenues of almost $30 million.
Meanwhile, the European video ad network Smartclip is also selling to the video and content network Adconion, which wants to integrate Smartclip’s in-stream and connected-TV advertising formats in to its own offering.
Adconion will also use Smartclip to serve ads through Joost, which it acquired in order to built a branded-content video service.
The acquisition, which includes access to Smartclip’s 500 publisher sites, puts Adconion is 17 additional countries, including central and eastern Europe, plus puts Adconion on the cusp of the connected TV opportunity.
What is going on in the segment? Adconion CEO Tyler Moebius:
“The online video and web TV market is incredibly fragmented across the globe and there is an extreme shortage of quality in-stream inventory. We’re seeing the same market evolution in video inventory that we experienced in premium display several years ago.
“Opportunistic vertical broker networks are popping up every day and are focused only on arbitrage, or brokering the same real estate and essentially adding no value to the advertisers, publishers or content partners.”