TechCrunch | Gannett Blog
TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden and Josh Constine report that Gannett will pay “up to $92 million” for the Facebook advertising company firm BLiNQ Media, with $23 million coming upfront and the rest over the next few years.
The rationale behind the deal is clear:Â when brands buy ad placements on Gannett properties, it could use BLiNQ to also sell them ads on social sites and collect a solid margin.
Gannett is looking to BLiNQ, which has built up a profitable Facebook ads API business, to become G’s equivalent of the Washington Post Company’s SocialCode, its social media marketing and analytics agency (which picked up 15 Digg engineers in May). Gannett and BLiNQ, TechCrunch understands, have already been working together for about a year on ad campaigns for advertising clients, primarily via those brands’ agencies. This will bring more of that expertise in house.
Gannett Blog’s Jim Hopkins reacts:
A deal worth this much money would be one of the largest I can recall GCI ever signing. The only one approaching it would be the reported $100 million the company paid in 2005 for advertising services subsidiary PointRoll.
TechCrunch reported in July that BLiNQ had revamped its service to allow clients to track app installations, “buy home page ads and logout page takeovers, and target ads specifically to mobile.”
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