Facebook has announced plans to acquire video advertising firm LiveRail, which helps companies including Dailymotion and Gannett serve better ads that appear on their websites and in apps.
HumanIPO reported in December Facebook was to begin selling video ads in order to increase its revenues.
LiveRail, founded in 2007, provides a comprehensive platform for finding and serving ads to online video publishers.
“We believe that LiveRail, Facebook and the premium publishers it serves have an opportunity to make video ads better and more relevant for the hundreds of millions of people who watch digital video every month,” Facebook said.
“More relevant ads will be more interesting and engaging to people watching online video, and more effective for marketers too. Publishers will benefit as well because more relevant ads will help them make the most out of every opportunity they have to show an ad.”
The social network has seen a number of acquisitions in the past few months, the most high profile of which occurred in February when it purchased mobile instant messaging platform WhatsApp for US$16 billion.
The move has been opposed by privacy advocates saying the social network would be incorporating personal information from the messaging service into its profiling business model.
Nonetheless, approval for the acquisition was granted by United States regulators after Jan Koum, WhatsApp chief executive officer (CEO), said the accusations were careless and unfounded.
Earlier this year Facebook announced its ad revenue was up 76 per cent, with 53 per cent of that coming from mobile advertising.
