Twitter has made its largest acquisition to date as it gobbles up a start-up for around $350 million in stock says the search marketing team at clickmate.
MoPub, which is a tool which allows mobile publishers to effectively manage their ad network, gives Twitter another channel when it comes to strengthening its advertising business on mobile platforms.
It’s being said in the market that MoPub was a prime target for a number of tech companies.
The deal is all shares and considering that Twitter is building up for an IPO, it could be worth considerably more than the asking price. Grey Twitter shares are already trading in the secondary market and the executive management of MoPub could be sitting on a major earn-out.
In the run up to its IPO, Twitter has been focussing on how it can increase revenue generation across its user base.
MoPub currently works with a number of publishers and is unlikely to drop its existing partnerships.
A Twitter statement said: “We also plan to use MoPub’s technology to build real-time bidding into the Twitter ads platform so our advertisers can more easily automate and scale their buys…Our approach is to show an ad when we think it will be useful or interesting to a user, and that isn’t changing.”
MoPub has been around for three years and the management team were a spin-off from AdMob, a Google mobile ad network. The company raised nearly $20 million to fund its start-up development. It’s believed that the company has reached the $100 million revenue mark and aims to make a 25% gross margin.