Yahoo acquires Flurry to strengthen mobile products

Tuesday July 22, 2014 , 4 min Read

Within less than a week of announcing its Q2 earnings, Yahoo! Inc. announced today that they will be acquiring Flurry, the company which helps in optimizing mobile experiences through app analytics and mobile advertising. Though the amount is undisclosed, it's expected to be in hundreds of million dollars. Flurry had received $73.3 million funding till date.

In the official statement Scott Burke, SVP Advertising Technology, Yahoo mentioned,

Our agreement to acquire Flurry is a meaningful step for the company and reinforces Yahoo’s commitment to building and supporting useful, inspiring and beautiful mobile applications and monetization solutions. By joining Yahoo, Flurry will have resources to speed up the delivery of platforms that help developers build better apps, reach the right users, and explore new revenue opportunities. Together, the companies can make mobile experiences better through products that are more personalized and more inspiring.

We want to harness our collective innovative spirit and bolster the mobile ecosystem by providing developers the analytics and monetization solutions to drive their success.

The combined scale of the two companies will accelerate revenue growth for thousands of developers and publishers across the mobile ecosystem. In addition, the joined offerings of Yahoo and Flurry will enable more effective mobile advertising solutions for brands seeking to reach their audiences and gain unique insights across desktop and mobile, and users will benefit from more personalized app experiences.

Also read: Can Yahoo! manage to reinvent itself?

Flurry in numbers

Flurry was started in 2005 and have been working with mobile app developers for a decade now. Today, mobile and its applications have disrupted every segment of the economy from media and entertainment, to communications, to travel, to retail and healthcare. Flurry has following stats in its kitty to boast about:

170,000 developers using Flurry Analytics
Over 540,000 applications
Flurry sees app activity from 1.4 billion devices monthly
Flurry sees 5.5 billion app sessions per day
Flurry Analytics is in 7 apps per device on average
8,000 publishers monetize with Flurry
Flurry works with mobile developers in 150 countries

Simon Khalaf, President and CEO of Flurry said in the official blog,

Like us, Yahoo is committed to mobile and has become a mobile first company with over 450 million mobile MAUs, a number that has grown by 36% since last year. As part of Yahoo, Flurry will continue to serve the application developer community in the way we always have, only better. With Yahoo, we will have access to more resources to speed up the delivery of great products that can help app developers build better apps, reach the right users for their apps and more importantly, make money from ads that look great and blend into the app experience. We have accomplished a lot on our own, but joined with Yahoo we are in an even better position to achieve our goals.

Following the closing, the Flurry team will remain in their present locations, and Flurry’s vision, mission, and focus will stay the same. Flurry’s products will continue to operate and innovate with Yahoo’s support and investment.

Yahoo mobile usage growth

Yahoo’s mobile display and search revenue each grew more than 100% year-over-year
More than half of Yahoo’s total monthly audience visits on a mobile device, and in Q2, over 450 million mobile monthly active users came to Yahoo, a 36% increase year-over-year
Time spent on mobile has grown 79% in the last year alone
The average Yahoo user now spends 86% of their time on smartphones in apps

There's more to conquer

Mobile gaming is still just 14% of the $93 billion gaming software industry. US mobile advertising still counts for less than 5% of the $162 billion US Advertising industry. US mobile payment accounts for under 1% of the North American $157 Billion payments market. M-commerce accounts for less than 1% of the $3.25 trillion US retail industry. These markets and others are all up for grabs.