Yahoo completes Flurry acquisition for mobile analytics

Yahoo said it has completed its acquisition of San Francisco-based Flurry, which specializes in mobile analytics for applications and app developers.
Complete details of the purchase were not disclosed, but several sources reported a price in the hundreds of millions of dollars when the acquisition was first announced last month. The New York Times cited sources who said the purchase price was around $300 million, while VentureBeat pegged the number at $240 million. Flurry, which started in 2008, will remain in its current location “with Yahoo’s support and investment,” according to Yahoo.
Scott Burke, SVP of advertising technology for Yahoo, said in a blog post that the purchase of Flurry “will be a meaningful step for the company and reinforces our commitment to building and supporting useful, inspiring and beautiful mobile applications and monetization solutions.”
Yahoo has been making a string of purchases of late, many with a mobile aspect as it tries to position itself as a multimedia company with a focus on mobility. This year, its mobile-related deals have included the acquisitions of Aviate for intelligent home screen information on smartphones and mobile marketing startup Sparq to mobile messaging company Blink. Burke emphasized that Yahoo “has been focused on re-imagining our users’ daily habits, and mobile is at the center of everything we do.” The company has certainly been talking up mobile of late, including in its most recent quarterly results when it said that its mobile display and search revenue both grew more than 100% year-over-year and that more than half of its total monthly visits came from mobile devices. Yahoo has been focused on its Gemini platform for unified mobile search and native buying, and CEO Marissa Mayer said during the company’s most recent quarterly call that the offering accounts for half of Yahoo’s mobile display revenue in the United States. However, Yahoo does not yet break out its mobile revenues distinctly in its reporting. 
Yahoo noted that the average Yahoo user spends 86% of their time on smartphones in apps — where the Flurry acquisition could offer particular value in terms of visibility into users’ behavior patterns and the ability to monetize that data via analytics for advertising. Flurry introduced its Flurry Marketplace mobile advertising platform last year.  
Yahoo cited a series of stats about the use of Flurry, which it said sees app activity from 1.4 billion devices per month and has 5.5 billion app sessions per day. Yahoo said that 170,000 developers use Flurry Analytics, which is in seven apps per device on average. The company works with mobile developers in 150 countries and is used in about 540,000 individual applications.