Quantcast has acquired MakeGood Software, a Seattle startup that simplifies data management and reporting for online advertising campaigns. As a result of the deal, the entire MakeGood team is relocating to Quantcast’s operations in San Francisco.
The MakeGood service will shut down as of February 8th. And while MakeGood founder Jeff Coon tells us that the product will be “end-of-lifed,” he added that much of the technology will be “repurposed” to help clients of Quantcast gain “the details and effectiveness of their ad campaigns.”
“Can’t say much more than that, except that the combination of Quantcast and MakeGood capabilities in this area is awesome,” he said.
Meanwhile, Quantcast CEO and co-founder Konrad Feldman said in a blog post that the software will accelerate its “ability to provide more in-depth and user-friendly reporting on ad campaigns delivered by Quantcast Advertise.” He added:
“In 2012 we surveyed the market, identifying and examining tools we might use to enhance our integration of campaign-related data and our associated reporting suite. We were very impressed by what the team at MakeGood had created. Their understanding of complex multi-system reconciliation and reporting was immense, and the elegant software they had created delivered a high degree of automation for this central industry challenge.”
We featured MakeGood as a Startup Spotlight last summer, with Coon telling us that he was inspired to start the company after struggling to compile advertising data and forecasts while running sales for CarDomain.
“We had one order lose $40,000 in a single month simply because we didn’t have the cycles or tools to monitor our ad delivery data from all these different sources,” said Coon. At the time of that interview, MakeGood employed four people, and it was in the process of raising a small round of cash from friends and family.
“We couldn’t be more thrilled to be joining Quantcast and to bring the advantages of the MakeGood software suite to the industry through Quantcast’s broadly adopted products,” Coon said in a statement this morning.
I followed up via email and asked Coon why they decided to sell now. Here’s what he had to say
“Quantcast’s vision of simplifying and automating key areas and capabilities of online advertising dovetails nearly perfectly with my and MakeGood’s vision and direction. Also, it’s simply fantastic opportunity and great team…We’re joining a much larger team — nearly 300 employees — and will be able to launch solutions to customers far more quickly.”
The acquisition follows a few other deals in the online ad tools sector in the past two year, including including Seattle’s AdXpose, which sold to comScore for $22 million, and Bellevue’s Adometry, which sold to Click Forensics for an undisclosed sum. Terms of the MakeGood Software acquisition were not disclosed.
