Facebook acquires video ad company LiveRail for US$500m

3 Jul 2014

The online advertising carousel keeps spinning, with social network Facebook’s acquisition of LiveRail, an online video-advertising agency, for US$500m.

Dealing with over 200 companies, LiveRail claims to target 7bn video adverts to visitors of their client’s websites each month and with Facebook’s acquisition, the company will still operate under its own name, albeit under the ownership of the social network, according to Tech Crunch.

In its official statement on the acquisition, LiveRail’s CEO Mark Trefgarne said the decision to go with Facebook made sense given its obvious far-reaching service: “When we started talking to the team at Facebook about how we could work together, it quickly became clear that we shared a vision for the future of digital advertising.

“They believed, as we do, that publishers deserve a new generation of audience-aware advertising technology. We realised that by joining forces we’d be able to draw upon our respective strengths to move even faster towards our shared vision of creating the advertising platform of the future.”

The first thing that will be implemented into Facebook from their technology will be its auto-play video ads which will now be able to target users better to what their tastes and interests are.

Likewise, Facebook’s enormous amounts of this user data could be used to sell advertising on LiveWire’s client sites giving them further reach.

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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