Company focusing on contextual targeting

Vobile Group agreed to acquire the RightsID and ChannelID assets from Zefr, which will focus on its contextual targeting platform for brands.

The purchase price is about $90 million, according to the companies.

The acquisition bolsters Vobile’s video identification, protection and monetization business. which helps reduce revenue losses due to IP infringement.

Vobile said it can offer its core technologies to a broader spectrum of enterprise content providers and is opening a new office in Los Angeles with about 100 employees.

“Today’s announcement marks a major step in the transformation of Vobile. With this transaction, we are combining complementary technologies and customer bases, expanding our monetization capabilities across content providers on video and social media platforms, diversifying our revenue stream and enhancing the capabilities of our market leading SaaS platform,” said Yangbin Wang, CEO of Vobile.

Zefr will focus on working with marketers to put their digital ad message adjacent to contextually relevant content. The company hired former Fox ad sales president Toby Byrne as president in 2017.

"Zefr's core business is our contextual targeting platform, which continues to accelerate. We're excited to focus our efforts on this expanding business,” said Rich Raddon, Zefr's co-founder and co-CEO.

“We believe we’ve found the perfect home for RightsID and ChannelID. We are very proud of the success these businesses have built with the world’s leading content providers and believe combining these assets with Vobile creates an unmatched content protection and measurement company for the modern digital media market,” added Zach James, Zefr’s other co-founder and co-CEO.