Source: Snap had acquisition talks with AdRoll, which is borderline profitable and on pace for $300M 2017 revenue; Snap actively looking at other ad tech firms
Snapchat is shopping for ad tech companies to help bolster its appeal to marketers, a process that led the company …
Context & Ripple Effects
Snap has been assembling its advertising business in stages: reports of an ad API in the works surfaced in early 2016, and by mid-2016 the company had launched the Ads API alongside Snap Ads Between Stories. The AdRoll talks reported here are the next move — rather than only building ad tooling in-house, Snap is now shopping for companies that already sell to marketers.
AdRoll fits that brief: it is borderline profitable and pacing toward $300M in 2017 revenue, so it would bring both technology and an existing advertiser base. The talks also previewed a pattern — months later Snap closed its acquisition of Metamarkets for under $100M, confirming the ad tech shopping spree was real.
First-order effects
- AdRoll gains a credible acquirer in Snap, giving a borderline-profitable business pacing toward $300M in 2017 revenue a potential exit path.
- Snap's ads team shifts from purely internal API development to evaluating external ad tech firms as acquisition targets.
Second-order effects
- Other independent ad tech firms become both Snap targets and rivals' defensive acquisition candidates, tightening the market for standalone ad tooling.
- If Snap buys measurement or targeting capability, marketers comparing Snapchat against Facebook and Google's mature self-serve stacks get a stronger reason to allocate budget to Snap.
Third-order effects
- The pattern that followed — Metamarkets for under $100M, later Fit Analytics for $124.4M — points to Snap treating M&A as its standard route to ad and commerce capability rather than building everything internally.
- For mid-sized ad tech firms, large social platforms emerge as the natural consolidation endpoint, reshaping the industry around platform-owned stacks.
The trend: Social platforms are acquiring their way into full-stack advertising businesses, with Snap's ad tech shopping — from the AdRoll talks through Metamarkets and Fit Analytics — as a clear data point.