Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Google Buys Ad Optimizer Teracent

Google’s acquisition spree continues: The company has bought Teracent, a start-up that customizes online ads on the fly. BoomTown reported in September that Google (GOOG) was interested in the San Mateo, Calif.,-based company, which is filled with veterans of…Yahoo (YHOO).

No purchase price disclosed, but I’m fairly confident this was in the sub-$50 million category. Teracent had been looking to raise something like $5 million earlier this year and had previously raised around $6 million, much of it from New Enterprise Associates.

I’m told the company was doing something under $2 million a year in revenue, and when I talked to CEO Vikas Jha in September, he told me that the three-and-a-half-year-old company is profitable.

One immediate beneficiary of the deal: Rival ad optimizer Tumri, which does very similar work.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald