Yahoo Is Buying Mobile Analytics Firm Flurry For North Of 300M | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Is Buying Mobile Analytics Firm Flurry For North Of 300M

techcrunch.com

85 pointsharunurhan47 comments

Very interesting to see this possible acquisition especially considering last year their CEO was quoted saying regarding a 2014 IPO.

"I consider an IPO an entrance," he tells us. "We don't have a choice, our volume is too high and our scale is too big for anyone to absorb us."

They've raised over $60M, so maybe they have cooled off quite a bit and seems they are about to get 'absorbed'

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/flurry-ipo-and-ceo-simon-khal...

That sounds like typical CEO BS speak.

That interview is from September 2013. Ad technology stocks have performed very poorly since then[1], so it's understandable they'd want to sell and avoid the headache of an IPO.

[1]: http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2014/06/02/why-ad-tech-stocks-are-g...

So if they raised close to $74 million and sold for $200 to $300 million, where do you think that left the founders and early employees?

http://www.tejusparikh.com/projects/equity_calculator/index....

100k at startup (+stock) vs 100k at bigco. Tells me I would make 100k more at bigco. Explain?

This is a genuine question: where is Yahoo getting all this money from?

I think the average internet-goer (myself included) would probably be surprised to hear they're profitable enough to have made so many large purchases recently...

Yahoo owns about 24% of Alibaba, a company that's worth ~$150B (varies widely on who you talk to). They are reducing their position by 5-10%, which translates into anywhere from $5B to $20B in cash.

Now thats a smart move, reduce your stake in one of the strongest growth stories ever to buy a struggling analytics company.

I think you're ignoring brand synergy.

Flurry is a perfect fit brand-wise.

What's the point of having a 3rd rate photo sharing service if you don't have 3rd rate analytics to go with it, and who wants growth when the rest of the company is dying?

The reduction in stake was a long-term agreement between the two. Yahoo has no choice but to sell. Keeping in mind the hotness of $BABA, they've re-negotiated the deal and now have permission to sell only ~140M shares at IPO, instead of the earlier agreed-upon ~230M.

They make $1B+ a quarter, have 2B in the bank and the stake in Alibaba should result in a large cash influx.

they are always well above water. valley does not like them because they dont grow as fast as other smaller companies and they are boring. ie they are more like GE than a startup.

They me be above water, but mostly due to their stake in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (an entirely separate company). Whatever Yahoo actually does isn't making a lot of money, and appears to have negative value in the market.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-17/is-yahoo-s-...

It's got more traffic than everyone except Google (and YouTube.com) and Facebook [1]. And they have a top 5 site for 8 of the 17 categories [2].

[fd -- yahoo employee]

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[1]: http://www.alexa.com/topsites

[2]: http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category

That's really interesting. Not doubting the numbers necessarily, but does Alexa still get its numbers from browser toolbars, making it somewhat biased?

Google Display Network Ad Planner rates Yahoo 3rd [1] (but does not count itself but does include YouTube so ...)

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[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites

http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/alexa-overhauls-ranking-sys...

Yahoo had a gross profit of $3.3B in the last year, and has $2.74B in the bank. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=YHOO+Key+Statistics

It seems like they were bailing out. If estimates say the company was worth ~700M and they sold for 300M and they were "racing toward a sale", seems to me Yahoo will have to revive it somehow if they want to make their money count.

The article saying the sale was somewhere between 300MM and 1BN. There is no confirmed actual sale price.

Well, that's pretty generic...

This is now on the Yahoo Tumbler:

http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/92461312524/yahoo-to-acquire-fl...

This may be a good place to ask this: Does anyone have experience using Flurry Analytics and Google Mobile App Analytics in production? We're comparing the two, and would love to get opinion from people, who have used them in production, about the not-so-obvious pros and cons.

There's no comparison, from my experience, Flurry is a lot better and more useful. But, I'm not a google analytics guru so its possible google is better if you know how to use it.

That said for the newbie, Flurry was much better.

We used Flurry last summer, but ended up switching to Localytics who we've been very happy with. The main reason was real-time data (which was really important to us since Flurry was lagging by several days). The nicer UX and faster customer support are big pluses as well.

I've been using Flurry for the past year and thinking of switching. I don't like the way Flurry presents data on their platform and the website is really slow.

We're using Flurry and I find their site really slow too and the graphs are a bit ordinary. Would much rather get live info.

I've used the iOS SDK for both in beta deployed apps, and prefer Flurry due to their more flexible custom events. With Google, a custom event has four fields (string, string, string, number), limiting how much you can capture for an event. Flurry allows up to ten, with data types of your choosing.

Flurry's definitely way better than GA for getting set up in spite of all the issues you'll run into at scale. Please give us a call once you hit that though.

Happy Flurry user since '11. Not all reports need to be realtime, in fact most don't. Their event tracking is solid and the reports are great for getting info at a glance. Doesn't hurt to use multiple, but I've always been content with Flurry's suite.

We just removed Flurry because Crashlytics' Answers is way too awesome.

Ditch both, use mixpanel.

GA and Flurry are to hit counters as Mixpanel is to GA/Flurry.

According to an update, the purchase price was between $200-$300M (not north of 300M).

A little over 2 years ago Yahoo discontinued[1] their Web Analytics Product. Nice to see them back to this space. I wonder for how long.

[1] http://marketingland.com/yahoo-web-analytics-to-be-discontin...

Do people think this is a move to compete with Facebook's Parse acquisition?

Perhaps. I think Parse has done well under Facebook. I hope Flurry does under Yahoo too.

cue another round of mobile analytics startups.

It's really a good time to start your own mobile company and sell it to Yahoo. Easy money.

Yeah, it's so trivial to build a mobile company and sell it to Yahoo.

touche.

From their site[0]: "Flurry sees 165B app sessions across 1.4B devices each month" so... even if Yahoo could turn each session into $0.05 of revenue, they could make it a $100b/yr business.

0: http://www.flurry.com/solutions/publishers

edited for order of magnitude error

How to do this is non-obvious to me.

Obvious way: Sell the "anonymous" users to advertisers to allow advertisers to improve their targeting.

Or... if some legal reason prevents third parties buying data, enhance this: https://advertising.yahoo.com/Advertisers/Mobile/ such that the benefits are worth more than $100m/yr

You're in the wrong ballback here and off by a factor of 1000 - it would be $100B/yr for $0.05 per session. Of course, $0.05 per session for mobile analytics is not reasonable to begin with.

True, unless they can do something innovative, then even $0.005/session is optimistic.

$0.05/session - just because you have your SDK there and see all the sessions doesn't mean you can charge that much.

To give you a context on how wrong you are, typical CPCs on banner/interstitial ad clicks on mobile apps is around $0.02-$0.05. You are charging more for analytics for each session vs. the clicks which advertisers are willing to pay to the publisher! A typical cost/impression for ads on mobile is $0.001 for top apps and $0.0005 for the poor ones. And these are all US numbers - for numbers in countries like India, China or Indonesia which have a sizable amount of users, you can imagine what those numbers will be (probably a fifth of US).

It is easy to say that even if Yahoo can do this or that, but once you put the numbers, you will realize that charging for analytics on a per session basis will never happen - it is a subscription model.

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