Content delivery network Akamai is branching out into advertising. The Boston-based company today announced an all-cash, $95 million acquisition of acerno, a targeted advertising company, and the creationg of a new advertising solutions platform.
Akamai is well-established with publishers, ad networks and advertisers to help deliver their online content more quickly, but the new purchase will help the company break into the ad targeting business.
The Advertising Decision Platform is a new division in the company that will help apply behavioral-targeting layers to ad campaigns, aided by acerno's history tracking consumer behavior online, predicting what they'll buy next and serving them ads accordingly.
With deep pocketed firms like AT&T coming into Akamai's main business of charging customers to deliver their web sites faster, expanding into advertising does not seem like a bad play, though the company's stock is down almost four percent today with the news.
Privacy problems could be another concern. Akamai is a member of the NAI, a group of ad networks that have agreed to follow self-regulated privacy-protection guidelines. The company says that its tracking will be anonymous and argues that having contracts with publishers and not consumers should limit privacy violations.
But while Akamai does not have as wide a reach as ISPs that ran into trouble with involuntary behavioral targeting of consumers last year, if Akamai's opt-out policies are not completely straight forward, the company could run into trouble with privacy advocates.
