Dapper Gets Bought By Yahoo; AppNexus Raises 50 Million Dollars In Series C Funding, As Microsoft Stakes A Claim

» It was announced last night that Dapper has been acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed sum - but it's likely to have been in the $40-$50 million dollar range. Dapper's dynamic creative solution has been getting a lot of traction of late. Yahoo has been a customer for some time. They obviously liked the product so much that they decided to buy the company. Yahoo clearly saw this as a must-have feature for its display offering, given that Terracent is already in Google's hands. It's expected that Yahoo will use the solution to provide clients with better re-targeting capabilities. Dapper is especially suited for the ecommerce space. Its dynamic creative solution allows an ecommerce vendor to remarket product offerings to customers based on past browsing behaviour. Yahoo will doubtless make Dapper for internal use only - so there will be no self-service options after current contractual obligations run out. It looks like we’ll have to get our dynamic creative fix elsewhere. The consolidation continues. Terry Kawaja's time spent on developing his eco-system map is clearly paying off.

» The other big news yesterday was the 50 million dollar funding raised by AppNexus. The funding will be used to expand the business globally - and develop new features on the platform. Fifty-million dollars is a pretty big chunk of money, but the real news here was Microsoft's heavy involvement in the AppNexus funding round. Hmmm. This suggests a couple of things to me: 1) Microsoft is giving up on developing an RTB platform, indicating that AdECN is as good as dead in the water; 2) Microsoft will have first refusal on buying AppNexus outright; and 3) more investments/acquisitions will follow from Microsoft, as it tries very hard to shadow what Google is doing in the space. Its visibility in the press release yesterday suggests that AppNexus - depending on growth and success - could very well be a Microsoft company within the next twelve months. It's getting more interesting all the time.