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Marimedia to buy AreaOne to create bigger social media data operation

As social media grows apace, with Facebook in particular attracting huge advertising dollars, more and more companies are setting up to try to guide advertisers through this maze.

Two such, Marimedia, which says it “leverages big data to optimise mobile and online advertising spend” and rival AreaOne are merging, in a $17m all share acquisition by Marimedia. Marimedia will henceforth be called Taptica. AreaOne is described as a “performance marketing technology company and accredited Facebook Marketing Partner.”

Worldwide spending on social network advertising is expected to reach $23.68 billion this year – an increase of 33.5 per cent over 2014. In the US social network ad revenues are set to more than double from $4.67 billion in 2013 to $9.59 billion in 2015, and grow a further 50 per cent over the next two years to $14.4 billion in 2017. The proportion of digital ad spending represented by social network ad spending is expected to increase from 10.8 per cent in 2013 to 19.3 per cent in 2017.

017fbb8Marimedia/Taptica CEO Hagai Tal (left) says: “This acquisition significantly accelerates our stated strategy of transitioning to a mobile offering. By adding established social media marketing capabilities to our existing big data expertise based on Taptica, we are investing in the growth of the combined business and ensuring that we can keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital media market in which we operate.”

The worry for investors is that all these companies depend, in the end, on data from the likes of Facebook. Google has recently become possessive in the extreme of its data and Facebook could, one day, go the same way.

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