Yahoo buys mobile game ad company Actionality
Yahoo continues to increase its offerings in mobile services. Earlier this month, it bought a small game startup called Actionality.
Yahoo’s expanding line of mobile services already includes games, and this purchase gives Yahoo another place to sell ads. Actionality sticks ads into mobile games and other applications as they’re being downloaded from a mobile web browser to a phone; competitors include Greystripe.
Yahoo also recently announced that it is expanding its mobile ad services to include Vodafone.
However, the profitability of mobile advertising — whether on a mobile browser or in a download — is in question.
We covered a mobile ad company called AdMob earlier this month, when it announced a number of brand-name partnerships and a rapid increase in traffic. A veteran affiliate marketer in the comment section of that story caustically provided his perspective and his data on how very little money Admob has made him, despite his initial enthusiasm for it.
The big question remains: do users actually respond to mobile advertising like they do to online advertising?
Actionality raised an undisclosed amount from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures last year.
Next Story: Those blasted Form Ds, to become even more transparent
Previous Story: The anti-iTunes movement: gBox, Universal, Wal-Mart, MTV, Rhapsody
About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.
-
lilian