As yet another sign of its increased focus on the power of online video, Facebook Inc. is set to acquire LiveRail, an advertising technology company that helps video publishers and marketers show relevant ads to consumers watching online video.
Founded in 2007, LiveRail has 170 employees across four offices and serves 7 billion video ads per month via web sites and mobile apps.
“When we started talking to the team at Facebook about how we could work together, it quickly became clear that we shared a vision for the future of digital advertising,” LiveRail’s CEO Mark Trefgarne wrote in a blog post yesterday. “They believed, as we do, that publishers deserve a new generation of audience-aware advertising technology. We realized that by joining forces we’d be able to draw upon our respective strengths to move even faster towards our shared vision of creating the advertising platform of the future.”
The social network did not disclose the financial terms of the deal and did not respond to a request for comment. In a blog post yesterday, Brian Boland, vice president of ads product marketing at Facebook, said the companies would work together to make video ads better and more relevant to consumers.
“More relevant ads will be more interesting and engaging to people watching online video, and more effective for marketers too,” he wrote. “We believe that LiveRail’s excellent product… and Facebook’s expertise with relevancy, delivery and measurement will help us make video advertising much better for everyone.”
The acquisition is the latest in a series of moves by Facebook centered on driving revenue from video ads.
In mid-March, Facebook began offering its Premium Video Ads to a select group of advertisers. The 15-second videos, which appear in users’ news feeds, start playing without sound. When a consumer clicks or taps the video, the video expands to take up the user’s full screen and the sound comes on.
In May, Facebook added metrics to enable retailers and brands to better determine how consumers view videos uploaded to the social network.
And most recently, in late June, the social network announced it had revamped the news feed to take into account how often each consumer tends to watch videos. The change means consumers who watch videos on Facebook—uploaded directly by brands or their friends—will likely see more videos in their news feeds. And the number of users who watch videos on Facebook is rapidly growing; the social network said in late June that twice as many people were watching videos on Facebook at that time than just six months prior. However, consumers who tend to skip over videos will likely see fewer videos as a result of the change.