Oracle has wasted little time in making its first purchase of the year, snapping up web tracking firm AddThis for a fee believed to be in the region of $175 million.
Sources reporting to DCInno have made an estimate of the undisclosed amount of money that saw AddThis become part of Oracle’s Data Cloud toolset. Since its early beginnings as a supplier of widgets that allowed publishers to add social share buttons to their websites, Virginia-based AddThis has expanded into a data collection service for marketers and website owners.
It now tracks the activity of 1.9 billion users every month following the adoption of its tools by 15 million publishers globally. This data is then fed to publishers to improve their delivery of relevant content, while advertisers can use the group’s third-party data to inform their serving of ads.
The acquisition will bolster Oracle’s data-as-a-service arm, which provides information for organisations to use with a multitude of applications and activities.
‘Unprecedented insight’
Along with access to a daily collection of 300 terabytes of data, Oracle has bought into a company with a strong core.
Founded in 2004, AddThis has 110 employees based across its offices in Vienna (VA) and New York, has generated $73 million in six rounds of funding and now has some serious financial clout by its side.
The purchase further highlights Oracle’s need to compete in the field of audience intelligence – a point which was emphasised with its purchasing of fellow data players BlueKai and Datalogix in 2014.
Omar Tawakol, SVP and GM, Oracle Data Cloud, commented: “Oracle Data Cloud ingests third-party data, extracts value, and activates the data to drive insights and harness this knowledge for targeting, personalization and measurement.
“With the addition of AddThis, Oracle Data Cloud’s offering is expected to deliver unprecedented levels of audience insight, measurement and reach.”
Tawakol’s letter, available here, adds that Oracle is “currently reviewing the existing AddThis Product roadmap” and will be providing guidance to its customers where needed.