Another Video Ad Tech Buy: Undertone Snags Jambo Media

More consolidation in the video ad business: Ad network Undertone has bought Jambo Media, which runs both its own video ad network and a platform for companies that run their own.

I don’t have a price for the deal, but from the outside, it looks a lot like the one we saw last month, when Specific Media picked up BBE: A big ad network that doesn’t do much with video buys its way into that business.

A reminder that while video ads are booming, they’re still relatively small: The Interactive Advertising Bureau says marketers spent $627 million on video in the first half of this year. That’s up 31 percent from 2009, but it’s still just 5 percent of the Web ad pie.

And while Google says that YouTube is getting ads on videos seen two billion times per week, there is plenty of room in the market for players most people have never heard of, like Tremor, YuMe and BrightRoll. But we will see more consolidation as the industry grows up a bit.

In 2008, Undertone raised a reported $40 million via a funding round supplied by JMI Equity. I believe that some of that money went back out the door to some managers and early investors. But at the time, Undertone said it would use the money for expansion, so that’s presumably where some of the Jambo money came from.