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

85 points by harunurhan 12y ago

fjcaetano 12y ago
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.
- ssharp 12y ago
  The article saying the sale was somewhere between 300MM and 1BN. There is no confirmed actual sale price.
  - fjcaetano 12y ago
    Well, that's pretty generic...
namityadav 12y ago
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.
- MCRed 12y ago
  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.
- varunsrin 12y ago
  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.
- dully 12y ago
  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.
  - prawn 12y ago
    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.
- greatjones 12y ago
  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.
- sskates 12y ago
  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.
- noinput 12y ago
  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.
- twidlit 12y ago
  We just removed Flurry because Crashlytics' Answers is way too awesome.
- fleitz 12y ago
  Ditch both, use mixpanel. GA and Flurry are to hit counters as Mixpanel is to GA/Flurry.
andrewdon 12y ago
It's really a good time to start your own mobile company and sell it to Yahoo. Easy money.
- endlessvoid94 12y ago
  Yeah, it's so trivial to build a mobile company and sell it to Yahoo.
  - oppositionradio 12y ago
    touche.
nattaylor 12y ago
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 http://www.flurry.com/solutions/publishers edited for order of magnitude error
- mikek 12y ago
  How to do this is non-obvious to me.
  - buro9 12y ago
    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/ https://advertising.yahoo.com/Advertisers/Mobile/ such that the benefits are worth more than $100m/yr
- ddlatham 12y ago
  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.
  - nattaylor 12y ago
    True, unless they can do something innovative, then even $0.005/session is optimistic.
- product50 12y ago
  $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.
Osmium 12y ago
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...
- meritt 12y ago
  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.
  - revelation 12y ago
    Now thats a smart move, reduce your stake in one of the strongest growth stories ever to buy a struggling analytics company.
    - fleitz 12y ago
      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?
    - discardorama 12y ago
      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.
- dshanahan 12y ago
  They make $1B+ a quarter, have 2B in the bank and the stake in Alibaba should result in a large cash influx.
- gcb0 12y ago
  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.
jasonwilk 12y ago
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-khalaf-2013-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/flurry-ipo-and-ceo-simon-khal...
- MagicWishMonkey 12y ago
  That sounds like typical CEO BS speak.
- applecore 12y ago
  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-going-south/ http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2014/06/02/why-ad-tech-stocks-are-g...
StephanKletzl 12y ago
According to an update, the purchase price was between $200-$300M (not north of 300M).
byoung2 12y ago
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?
- MagicWishMonkey 12y ago
  http://www.tejusparikh.com/projects/equity_calculator/index.html http://www.tejusparikh.com/projects/equity_calculator/index....
  - nahname 12y ago
    100k at startup (+stock) vs 100k at bigco. Tells me I would make 100k more at bigco. Explain?
josephlord 12y ago
This is now on the Yahoo Tumbler: http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/92461312524/yahoo-to-acquire-flurry-to-strengthen-mobile-products http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/92461312524/yahoo-to-acquire-fl...
yeukhon 12y ago
Do people think this is a move to compete with Facebook's Parse acquisition?
- sdernley 12y ago
  Perhaps. I think Parse has done well under Facebook. I hope Flurry does under Yahoo too.
nazgulnarsil 12y ago
cue another round of mobile analytics startups.
dudus 12y ago
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-discontinued-14223 http://marketingland.com/yahoo-web-analytics-to-be-discontin...

85 points by harunurhan 12y ago

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.

ssharp 12y ago
The article saying the sale was somewhere between 300MM and 1BN. There is no confirmed actual sale price.
- fjcaetano 12y ago
  Well, that's pretty generic...

namityadav 12y ago

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.

MCRed 12y ago
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.
varunsrin 12y ago
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.
dully 12y ago
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.
- prawn 12y ago
  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.
greatjones 12y ago
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.
sskates 12y ago
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.
noinput 12y ago
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.
twidlit 12y ago
We just removed Flurry because Crashlytics' Answers is way too awesome.
fleitz 12y ago
Ditch both, use mixpanel. GA and Flurry are to hit counters as Mixpanel is to GA/Flurry.

andrewdon 12y ago

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

endlessvoid94 12y ago
Yeah, it's so trivial to build a mobile company and sell it to Yahoo.
- oppositionradio 12y ago
  touche.

nattaylor 12y ago

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 http://www.flurry.com/solutions/publishers edited for order of magnitude error

mikek 12y ago
How to do this is non-obvious to me.
- buro9 12y ago
  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/ https://advertising.yahoo.com/Advertisers/Mobile/ such that the benefits are worth more than $100m/yr
ddlatham 12y ago
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.
- nattaylor 12y ago
  True, unless they can do something innovative, then even $0.005/session is optimistic.
product50 12y ago
$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.

Osmium 12y ago

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...

meritt 12y ago
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.
- revelation 12y ago
  Now thats a smart move, reduce your stake in one of the strongest growth stories ever to buy a struggling analytics company.
  - fleitz 12y ago
    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?
  - discardorama 12y ago
    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.
dshanahan 12y ago
They make $1B+ a quarter, have 2B in the bank and the stake in Alibaba should result in a large cash influx.
gcb0 12y ago
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.

jasonwilk 12y ago

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-khalaf-2013-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/flurry-ipo-and-ceo-simon-khal...

MagicWishMonkey 12y ago
That sounds like typical CEO BS speak.
applecore 12y ago
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-going-south/ http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2014/06/02/why-ad-tech-stocks-are-g...

StephanKletzl 12y ago

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

byoung2 12y ago

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?

MagicWishMonkey 12y ago
http://www.tejusparikh.com/projects/equity_calculator/index.html http://www.tejusparikh.com/projects/equity_calculator/index....
- nahname 12y ago
  100k at startup (+stock) vs 100k at bigco. Tells me I would make 100k more at bigco. Explain?

josephlord 12y ago

This is now on the Yahoo Tumbler: http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/92461312524/yahoo-to-acquire-flurry-to-strengthen-mobile-products http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/92461312524/yahoo-to-acquire-fl...

yeukhon 12y ago

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

sdernley 12y ago
Perhaps. I think Parse has done well under Facebook. I hope Flurry does under Yahoo too.

nazgulnarsil 12y ago

cue another round of mobile analytics startups.

dudus 12y ago

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-discontinued-14223 http://marketingland.com/yahoo-web-analytics-to-be-discontin...