Yahoo just acquired Flurry Mobile, a leading analytics and advertising company whose services are widely used among app developers and publishers.
The deal could be a big one for Yahoo. Flurry has long been considered a standout in the business of collecting and interpreting data that show how people use their mobile devices, ahead of other third-party solutions like Upsight, Localytics, Distimo and Mixpanel and even analytics from Google and Apple.
Under CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo now thinks of itself as a “mobile first” company and has scooped up many mobile-related startups in the past couple of years to fill out its mobile portfolio. According to its latest earnings statement, Yahoo’s mobile apps and search services have 450 million monthly users.
See also: Yahoo: Destroyer Of Startups
As with any Yahoo acquisition, it’s unclear what Flurry’s long-term outlook might be. Under Mayer, Yahoo has a habit of buying startups and closing them down while keep the employees and the intellectual property.
Yahoo clearly thinks Flurry can help grow its mobile advertising business. Announcing acquisition on Yahoo’s corporate Tumblr account was Scott Burke, the company’s senior vice president of advertising technology.
“After the transaction closes, the Flurry team will remain in its present locations, where their vision, mission, and focus will stay the same. Flurry’s products will continue to operate and innovate with Yahoo’s support and investment,” Burke wrote.
Yahoo is purchasing a window into everything that’s going on in the world of mobile apps. Flurry has a massive trove of data on just about every app category; roughly 170,000 developers currently use its analytics. Flurry sees 5.5 billion app sessions (the act of opening an app, performing an action and closing an app) a day and is on 1.4 billion devices across the world. In his statement, Burke said that Flurry analytics are on an average of seven apps on any individual smartphone.
Flurry’s pile of data has made it one of the best spotters of mobile trends across the industry, whether noting the rise of mobile apps over use of the open Web or that the craze for dating apps was extremely popular with men. Flurry’s mobile data reports have been seen as go-to reading for anybody interested in what is happening in the app economy for several years.
Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but reports indicate that the deal is between $300 million and $1 billion.
Lead image of Simon Khalaf at ReadWrite Mix by Madeleine Weiss for ReadWrite
