Microsoft Announces Acquisition of Rapt

Microsoft Corp. announced plans to acquire Rapt Inc., the leading provider of advertising yield management solutions for digital media publishers. Rapt’s technology, along with its information and advisory services offerings, will become key components of the Atlas Publisher Suite, part of Microsoft’s Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group. With the inclusion of Rapt, the Atlas Publisher Suite allows Microsoft to provide its customers with integrated asset and inventory management, forecasting, yield and sales management, and ad delivery and operations.

“Online publishers have a complex array of needs, and they require more attentive and sophisticated partners to help them solve these challenges,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group at Microsoft. “With this acquisition, we are uniquely positioned to help publishers succeed on all fronts. Our end-to-end solution will include workflow tools, ad package and delivery, turnkey distribution, content partnerships, and yield management and optimization.”

A key product that will emerge from the marriage of Rapt’s planning capabilities and Atlas’ campaign management capabilities is an integrated publisher sales workflow solution. This solution will improve upon the existing industry offerings for publishers’ sales teams when used with Rapt’s existing pricing analytics, inventory management and business intelligence products on top of Atlas’ ad serving platform.

“The opportunity to join forces with Microsoft and to see our technology flourish inside a much larger platform was too compelling to pass up,” said Tom Chavez, founder, president and CEO of Rapt. “We’re confident that, with Microsoft, we can continually improve publisher results and aggressively grow our combined client base that already includes over half of the top 25 U.S. publishers.”

About Rapt

Rapt Inc. is the industry standard in advertising yield management solutions. Rapt helps advertising supported businesses realize full value from their media assets through a unique combination of technology, services, and market insight. Rapt’s technology enables media companies to better price, predict, and provision advertising assets; Rapt’s services help drive best-practice yield strategy and operations; and Rapt’s information and data offerings deliver unique insight into supply, demand, and value dynamics across the digital media industry. Rapt’s client base includes CNET Networks, Dow Jones & Company, Expedia, Fox Interactive Media, Microsoft, MTV Networks, NBC Universal, The New York Times Company, Reuters, USA TODAY, Yahoo!, and others.