Fiksu, a mobile marketing specialist catering in app user acquisition, has been absorbed into the performance marketing agency ClickDealer.
Terms of the deal offered by the Noosphere-owned group haven’t been released, but there are suggestions that Boston-based Fiksu was shouldered off the market by competition from large ad tech firms attempting to reach the same smartphone-using audience.
In a statement to the Boston Globe, Fiksu CEO Micah Adler said: “Eighty-five cents of every new online advertising dollar goes to Google and Facebook.
“It’s harder and harder for small companies to compete.”
Ahead of the acquisition Fiksu had been on the hunt for an acquirer for “a few months”, according to a former employee.
ClickDealer, which specialises in pay per click (PPC) and cost per acquisition (CPA) campaigns, was drawn to Fiksu’s huge user data pools, which hold profiles on approximately 3.7 billion devices.
These contain banks of information on what types of apps are being downloaded, what’s cueing users to install them and how often they’re used.
Financial downfall
In recent times Fiksu had attempted a float on the stock market to raise some extra cash.
Despite generating $17 million from investors since its founding in 2008, driving 7.2 billion app installs to date and reporting annual revenue of $100 million in 2014, Fiksu’s bid to go public was denied last year.
This was in part owed to a wide decline in ad tech stock that has since shut the door on similar moves from competitors.
Further cracks began to show in 2015 when the company shed 26 of its workforce – a 10% cut – while Micah stated recently that staff headcount now sits at just 120 across offices in Massachusetts, San Francisco and London.
Commenting on the acquired company, ClickDealer’s CEO, Dmitry Atamanyuk described Fiksu as a “natural fit” for his business, which is looking to enhance its own mobile advertising capabilities.
He added: “Fiksu is a market pioneer with five years of aggregated data on their side that we will fold into our own considerable expertise in mobile in order to produce unique monetisation opportunities for both advertisers and publishers.”
