Yahoo has acquired the startup Luminate, a service that focuses on advertising on top of online images, as the Internet giant tries to give its once-mighty ad business a jolt. The service shut down earlier this week, and terms of the deal were not disclosed. TechCrunch earlier on Friday reported the news. The company, founded in 2008 in Mountain View, Calif., is an ad network with more than 180 million users and more than 6 billion image views each month, according to Luminate’s website. The service lets marketers layer product, display and text ads over images.
Yahoo is continuing their buying binge in a bid to strengthen its core online advertising offerings. Fresh off their $240 million purchase of mobile analytics standout Flurry in late July, and 13 other companyies so far this year, Sunnyvale-based Yahoo bought interactive photo ad network Luminate Friday for an undisclosed sum and did what they sometimes do when buying a company. They shut it down. In a post on the Luminate homepage early Friday evening, chief executive and co-founder James Everingham said the startup’s more than 10,000 publishers and customers would have until Oct. 1 to access existing accounts and information before the plug was pulled. The post stated: “We are thrilled to be joining Yahoo where we can continue to bring innovative experiences to an even larger audience. We will be stopping all of our in-image services as of Wednesday, September 3, 2014. If you are a Luminate publisher, our JavaScript snippet will no longer run anything on your site. If your site(s) have individually earned over $10, you will be receiving a final payment for each site by September 30, 2014. If you are a Luminate Direct advertiser, you will be refunded the remainder of your balance by September 30, 2014.”
