Yahoo! Buys BlueLithium To Strengthen Ad Presence, A Mistake

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Yahoo! (YHOO) has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire BlueLithium, one of the largest and fastest growing online global ad networks that offers an array of direct response products and capabilities for advertisers and publishers. Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will acquire BlueLithium for approximately $300 million in cash. 

BlueLithium provides media buying expertise that is complementary to the Yahoo! Publisher Network, enabling Yahoo! to further extend the reach and frequency of the quality audience advertisers have come to expect.

BlueLithium describes its businesses this way. "Unlike behavioral-targeting-only networks, BlueLithium leverages all major targeting capabilities to produce optimal results. Depending on your specifications and the needs of the campaign, the BlueLithium optimization team will layer: We target each of our 145M unique users based on their demonstrated interests, then serve the right ad regardless of what site they are on across our network."

It would appear that YHOO is getting more deeply into the display advertising market through network targeting which does not appear to be helping revenue at the portal or rivals AOL and MSN. With so much of the online dollar moving off to search results and social networks, it is surprising that Yahoo! would double down on such a tough business.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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