• Video AdTech M&A and Financings Continue

    There’s plenty of M&A and financing activity in the video adtech space, with the latest news coming this morning with RhythmOne acquiring YuMe for $185 million. The deal had been rumored for a while and unites YuMe’s demand-side capabilities with RhythmOne’s supply-side and programmatic platform. YuMe was one of the earliest video adtech players to go public, back in 2013, but has had a bumpy ride as the industry rapidly evolved.

    The RhythmOne-YuMe deal follows last week’s news that European broadcaster RTL Group bought out the remaining 36.4% of SpotX to bring its ownership to 100%. The deal valued SpotX at $404 million, up from the approximately $222 million valuation when RTL acquired 65% of the company back in July, 2014. The companies said that since then SpotX has almost doubled revenues and quadrupled EBITDA, opened 7 offices in 7 countries and hired 150+ new employees.

    Also last week, VideoAmp raised a $21.4 million Series B round, led by Mediaocean, with participation by RTL Group and several venture capital firms, bringing total funding for the company to $36.6 million. The new capital will be used primarily to expand engineering and license addition first party data sets. VideoAmp’s software platform is focused on unifying the planning, packaging and activation of linear TV and video ad campaigns. VideoAmp said it grew revenue 400% from 2015 to 2016.

    Finally, last week brought the long-awaited filing of Roku’s IPO. While Roku is of course best known for its devices, as the company’s financials showed, Roku’s “platform revenue” which include ad sales, subscription and transaction revenue and licensing deals with TV brands and service operators, accounted for 41% of its total revenue in the first half of 2017. That was up 91% vs. the first half of 2016. More telling is that platform gross profit accounted for 81% of the Roku’s gross profit vs. 19% for player revenue. A big part of Roku’s growth story going forward is based on its ad revenues.

    No doubt as the industry continues to evolve and grow we’ll see more video adtech M&A and financings.