Media.net acquired for $900M in mega ad-tech deal. Announced about 3 days ago.<p>Official announcement:<p>http://www.media.net/en/press<p>Coverage at various other sources:<p>https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/22/media-net-acquired-for-900m-in-mega-ad-tech-deal/<p>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-22/yahoo-ad-partner-media-net-sells-to-china-group-for-900-million<p>In my recollection, this is probably the largest exit in the Internet space where the company was not VC backed so I find this particularly interesting. What do you all think about this?
There were 5 HN postings about it in the last few days <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Media.net&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Media.net&sort=byDate&prefix&p...</a> . The only one with comments (20) is <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12342889" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12342889</a> . It was flagged, fwiw. There wasn't the sort of discussion you are looking for.
This hit the front page of Medium on the day. I was surprised that I didn't see anything about the acquisition on HN as well.<p><a href="https://backchannel.com/two-decades-ago-he-borrowed-500-from-his-dad-ef20be70f8f9#.atavfdz64" rel="nofollow">https://backchannel.com/two-decades-ago-he-borrowed-500-from...</a>
Ad-tech is such an odd-space. Every glimpse I get of it is fascinating: huge scale at minuscule latency, hard engineering problems, super-high valuations and exits: and yet, if you told me the top 10 names in ad-tech, I probably wouldn't recognize any of them. And I think most people are the same way. It's just a weird black-box sector of tech that almost nobody talks about. Not sure why though...
HN doesn't care much about acquisitions, unless it's one of the hot-name startups. The company I worked for was bought for $1.1B a few years back. I don't think the thread on it got a single upvote.