Ask HN: Did I miss a thread about this $900M acquisition? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did I miss a thread about this $900M acquisition?

7 pointswebtechgal8 comments

Media.net acquired for $900M in mega ad-tech deal. Announced about 3 days ago.

Official announcement:

http://www.media.net/en/press

Coverage at various other sources:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/22/media-net-acquired-for-900m-in-mega-ad-tech-deal/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-22/yahoo-ad-partner-media-net-sells-to-china-group-for-900-million

In my recollection, this is probably the largest exit in the Internet space where the company was not VC backed so I find this particularly interesting. What do you all think about this?

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There were 5 HN postings about it in the last few days https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Media.net&sort=byDate&prefix&p... . The only one with comments (20) is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12342889 . It was flagged, fwiw. There wasn't the sort of discussion you are looking for.

Thanks for the heads up. Looking at the deal size (and the nature of the company), I'd have expected there to be at least some good interest/discussion on this at the HN community but apparently, not.

This hit the front page of Medium on the day. I was surprised that I didn't see anything about the acquisition on HN as well.

https://backchannel.com/two-decades-ago-he-borrowed-500-from...

Ad-tech is such an odd-space. Every glimpse I get of it is fascinating: huge scale at minuscule latency, hard engineering problems, super-high valuations and exits: and yet, if you told me the top 10 names in ad-tech, I probably wouldn't recognize any of them. And I think most people are the same way. It's just a weird black-box sector of tech that almost nobody talks about. Not sure why though...

> It's just a weird black-box sector of tech that almost nobody talks about. Not sure why though...

My thoughts exactly ...

Probably we don't talk about it because it's a part of our industry that we're not exactly proud of.

HN doesn't care much about acquisitions, unless it's one of the hot-name startups. The company I worked for was bought for $1.1B a few years back. I don't think the thread on it got a single upvote.

What was the company if you don't mind me asking?

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