270 million would be too much if the goal was to target bolstering.
You know, that pull-quote is kinda babblicious. Problems with single algorithms. Yes. One size does not fit all. But multiple algorithms imply that a decision has to be made as to which algorithm to invoke and there the single algorithm re-emerges. Or it means they accept that x% of the time they will choose wrong and the new owner hopes that the wrong percent from approximation is less than the wrong percent from the single algorithm.
And I wonder what "handling scaling" means, as in, what is being scaled, and as the magnitude of the what increases by one, does the magnitude of errors increase by less than one (and, ideally, not increase at all)?
I know, I'm being too hard on some guys who want to flip a company and some guys who have a troubled company and are charged with doing something. I am especially apologetic for being clueless and not lingering over the graphic to understand what it is Interclick does that Yahoo! couldn't.
Yahoo has acquired Interclick, which makes advertising targeting and optimization software, in a deal valued at $270 million.
The deal comes at an interesting time considering since Yahoo is often rumored to be an acquisition target. Interclick employees will join Yahoo and get an interesting ride to say the least.
According to Yahoo, Interclick will give it data targeting, optimization technology and more premium inventory to sell. Yahoo has been exploring an ad partnership with Microsoft and AOL to compete better with Google. That partnership would pool inventory into premium packages.
Interclick could serve as the glue if such an ad partnership were to develop completely. Yahoo noted in a statement that Interclick’s team is “experienced in selling audiences across disparate sources of pooled supply.”
As for Interclick’s platform, it has two flagship tools—Open Segment Manager and Genome Platform—that integrate ad campaigns and data sources. On its site, Interclick notes that its Open Segment Manager (OSM) is designed to do behavioral targeting at scale. The company said on its Open Segment Manager overview:
The biggest challenge in data targeting was the perceived lack of scale. The scale issue partly stemmed from technical and statistical problems. But we also believed that “single algorithm” approaches had severe limitations. OSM’s new multi-algorithm approach overcomes this by appropriately dealing with core statistical challenges faced in digital advertising: enormous dimensionality, sparsity, noise, rare events, and more.
OSM launched in late 2009.
Here’s how Interclick’s parts fit together.
The acquisition is expected to close in early 2012. Yahoo paid $9 a share for Interclick, which closed at $7.40 on Monday.
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