Yahoo Buying Mobile App Company Flurry [Updated] Paying ‘hundreds of millions’

Yahoo is buying Flurry, a mobile app advertising and data firm, the companies said today. CEO Marissa Mayer’s latest acquisition should give Yahoo a bigger presence in mobile advertising, an area in which it has noticeably lagged.

Yahoo watchers have expected the company to make a bigger move into mobile marketing and advertising technology. Flurry supplies user stats to about 170,000 app developers, including Snapchat, Pinterest and the BBC, according to its website.

Yahoo and Flurry both announced the acquisition in blog posts.

Flurry will cost “hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to Re/Code, which broke the story on the acquisition.

Yahoo’s ad business has been struggling, and last quarter its display revenue declined. It has yet to make significant money from mobile, but eMarketer noted that Yahoo executives now say mobile revenue is a “meaningful” portion of its business. Before last quarter, mobile was considered “not material.”

Yahoo said that its mobile revenue was up 100 percent year over year last quarter, and that 450 million monthly mobile visitors represented a 36 percent increase.

Google and Facebook accounted for two-thirds of the nearly $18 billion mobile ad market last year, according to eMarketer.