Twitter has made another acquisition to build the social network’s ad tech business — specifically in the area of native ads. It has acquired Namo Media, a specialist in “native ad” content that integrates with the site where the ads are being viewed, with a focus on mobile ads. Twitter is not commenting on the price, but reliable sources have said it is around $50 million.
Namo Media is closing down its standalone operation and integrating into the Twitter-owned MoPub platform, the startup wrote in a blog post announcing the news. There are around eight people working for the startup now who likely will be joining Twitter.
The idea of seamless ads fits in with how Twitter has been trying to ramp up its own advertising business both on desktop and mobile versions — eschewing banners and ads in the margins in favor of tweets, and more recently cards, that appear in a user’s Twitter stream in the form of Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts.
“Since we acquired MoPub last October, we have been working to bring native ads to mobile app publishers in order to create a more seamless and less intrusive ad experience for users,” Twitter’s ad head Kevin Weil wrote in a blog post announcing the deal. “We believe strongly that all app developers large and small should be able to monetize their applications without sacrificing the user experience.”
San Francisco-based Namo Media was backed by a number of top investors such as Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Betaworks, Trinity Ventures, Susa Ventures, Chung-Man Tam, Kevin Scott, Garrick Toubassi, Ben Ling, Michael Levit, Tikhon Bernstam and Paul Buchheit and had raised just under $2 million, according to Crunchbase.
source: techcrunch.com
