Perfect Market Buys Media River

Perfect Market Inc., a Pasadena, Calif.-based provider of marketing services for publishers, has acquired Media River Technology, a provider of technology for instantly matching content and advertising. No financial terms were disclosed. Perfect Market has raised nearly $40 million in VC funding since 2005, from firms like Mayfield Fund, Idealab, Rustic Canyon Partners, Trinity Ventures and Square 1 Ventures.

 

PRESS RELEASE

 

Perfect Market, Inc., a marketing services firm for publishers that specializes in “lighting up” underutilized content and creating additional revenue from these assets, announced today that it has acquired MediaRiver’s patent-pending technology for matching content and advertising to any web page on the fly. The technology reads the contents of a web page and responds with highly relevant content and advertising to match the page. MediaRiver’s targeting solution helps publishers and advertisers reach engaged users by efficiently tapping search, display, and widget networks. The entire MediaRiver team has joined Perfect Market and the company’s founder and chief technology officer, Dr. Jay Budzik, will assume the role of CTO at Perfect Market. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

 

“Dr. Budzik, a highly-regarded scientist for his work in bringing cohesiveness to unstructured content, and his team at MediaRiver have been at the forefront of developing some of the most advanced algorithms and technologies for targeting content and ads to web pages,” said Julie Schoenfeld, CEO of Perfect Market. “Given the strong synergies between our two companies, we’re thrilled to be working together to offer publishers more ways to monetize their content.”

 

“Perfect Market helps users find valuable content that they may have previously missed. By combining MediaRiver’s targeting and optimization capabilities with Perfect Market’s existing technologies and business, we are creating an even more efficient end-to-end service,” said Dr. Jay Budzik, Founder and CTO of MediaRiver. “MediaRiver is pleased to be joining forces with such an outstanding team.”

 

Perfect Market has developed a potent blend of technical and economic intelligence to give content publishers an efficient and meaningful way of driving traffic to and monetizing their underutilized content. By exposing publisher content to a wider audience, Perfect Market’s service brings the web searcher high value, branded content that was difficult or impossible to find previously and provides publishers with a simple way to extract additional value from their existing libraries.

 

Perfect Market’s end-to-end service delivers and monitors results immediately, yet requires very little from the publisher to get started. Any publisher with a large content library is a potential partner. Most importantly, the service is a no-risk proposition for publishers. The program is structured to enable publishers to utilize the service with no upfront capital outlays or investment of scarce IT resources. Additionally, Perfect Market’s service fully complements existing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) programs.

 

About Perfect Market, Inc.

Perfect Market, Inc. is a marketing services company that helps online publishers monetize their large libraries of archived content with little or no risk to the publisher. The company applies proprietary processes to this problem, including cutting edge economics, natural language and machine learning algorithms. The Perfect Market solution fully complements existing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) programs by delivering underutilized web archives to end-users and advertisers. By bringing to light valuable content that might not otherwise be found, Perfect Market improves the search experience for end-users, provides targeted impressions to advertisers and brings new revenue to the publisher’s bottom line. Lead investors include Idealab, Trinity Ventures, Rustic Canyon and Square 1 Bank. Perfect Market, a network company of Idealab, builds on Idealab’s achievements in the search industry such as its creation of the paid search model through Overture Services, acquired by Yahoo! in 2003. Perfect Market, Inc. is based in Pasadena, CA. Additional information may be found at www.perfectmarket.com.