Yahoo buys image advertising platform Luminate

Luminate has already shut down services, and the team is coming to work at Yahoo

In an effort to step up its advertising game, Yahoo has purchased image advertising platform Luminate, it has been revealed in a post on Luminate's homepage.

No financial terms of the deal were disclosed, but this seems to be yet another acqui-hire by Yahoo, given that Luminate will be shutting down, with the team coming to work at its new company.

Six years ago we started our adventure to make online images come alive for publishers and advertisers. We've built a platform that over 10,000 publishers use to generate incremental revenue from contextually relevant targeted advertisements," James Everingham, CEO of Luminate, wrote.

"We are thrilled to be joining Yahoo where we can continue to bring innovative experiences to an even larger audience."

All in-image services were shut down this past Wednesday, September 3rd, though all publishers, advertisers and experts will still have the ability to to login and access their account information until October 1st. For publishers, Luminate's JavaScript snippet will stop running on their websites, and all Luminate Direct advertisers will be refunded the remainder of their balance by the end of this month.

As to what the Luminate team will actually be working on now that they are Yahoo employees, or if Yahoo would be using its technology, neither of those was made clear. VatorNews has reached to Yahoo to find out and we will update if we learn more. 

Founded in 2008 as Pixazza, the Mountain View-based company rebranded itself in 2011 as Luminate, a company whose mission is to transform images into rich interactive experiences, by allowing marketers to layer text ads, display ads and product ads over images.

Over 10,000 publishers used the service and it serves more than 180 million users and over 6 billion image views each month.

The company had raised a total of $28 million, most recently $10.7 million in a Series C round of funding in February of 2012. Investors in Luminate included Nokia Growth Partners, August Capital, CMEA, Google Ventures and Shasta.

Yahoo's 2014 acquisitions

This is Yahoo's twelth purchase so far this year. 

It bought Distill, a provider of a video interviewing and scheduling service for recruiters; Aviate, a replacement Android home screen launcher; mobile marketing startup Sparq; virtual gaming company Cloud Party; enterprise app studio Tomfoolery; Incredible Labs, the company behind mobile personal assistant app Donna; Wander, the company behind blogging app Days; high-quality streaming video company RayV; mobile ad exchange Flurry; recommendation platform Zofari; and ad fraud security company ClarityRay.

(Image source: cleveland.com)