Facebook goes big on video adverts with Liverail acquisition

SOCIAL NETWORK Facebook has added video advertising company Liverail to its growing string of acquisitions, with reports claiming it paid between $400 and $500m for the company.

Facebook VP of ads product marketing Brian Boland announced the buyout in a blog post, saying that with Liverail under its wing, the social network will be better placed to serve more relevant video ads that will be more engaging for users and more effective for marketers.

Boland said, 'Today we're announcing that we have agreed to acquire Liverail, an advertising technology company that helps companies like Major League Baseball (MLB.com), ABC Family, A&E Networks, Gannett, and Dailymotion serve better ads in the videos that appear on their websites and apps.

'We believe that Liverail's excellent product - known in the industry as a video supply-side platform or SSP - and Facebook's expertise with relevancy, delivery and measurement will help us make video advertising much better for everyone.'

Liverail, which was founded in 2007 and presently ranks as the third-largest video ad seller in the US, will remain a standalone service for now, with Facebook saying that it will keep its existing business of selling ads for non-Facebook publishers.

It seems that the firm is rather pleased about being picked up by Facebook, saying on its website, ' Today we're extremely excited to announce that Liverail has agreed to be acquired by Facebook.

'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 realized 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.'

Facebook started rolling out video adverts in March, and it's likely that users will soon start seeing more appearing in their News Feeds. µ