
Google acquires local search and search advertising firm, a big move for the company
- August 3, 2021
The Google acquisition of local search advertising company, Blob Opera, will give the company more reach than any other major search engine, analysts said on Thursday.
Blob’s ad network will now include nearly 60 million searches a month and reach more than 1.5 billion people worldwide.
“Google’s acquisition of Blob and other local search ad networks gives them a real opportunity to deliver more targeted, relevant advertising to a wider range of consumers and businesses across the world,” said Brian Wieser, a senior research analyst at Forrester Research.
Google has long been looking for ways to expand its reach beyond its main home turf of Google.
In 2016, the company launched a Google Plus social network, but it was later removed due to concerns about the privacy of its users.
Google also recently launched a new service called Google Now that is available on Android smartphones and tablets.
The new acquisition, which is expected to close in the second quarter of 2019, comes as Google’s search business continues to struggle with a lack of revenue from its digital advertising business.
Google Now is a search-based feature that allows users to learn about upcoming events and offers quick summaries of relevant information.
The acquisition of the ad network comes after the company announced it had bought the company Blob last year for $3.2 billion.
The company’s parent company, Google, has been struggling for years with slowing growth, including a slump in mobile advertising revenue, as the company tries to figure out how to get users to use its services on a regular basis.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said last year that Google would be closing its search business in 2020.
Google and Blob, which provides a service for businesses to create custom search queries and displays the results in a visual format, had been partners for more than five years.
The move comes after Google announced plans to add a new advertising service called DoubleClick to its Android app, in an attempt to get people to switch to the platform.
Google had previously launched the DoubleClick advertising service on iOS and Android devices, but that service was discontinued.
The Blob acquisition comes after Blob reported a third-quarter loss of $5.5 million, which was lower than Wall Street analysts’ expectations of $8 million.
Google said its revenue fell $6.4 million to $4.9 billion, while the loss in advertising revenue fell to $5 billion from $7 billion.
Blobs revenue grew by nearly 20% to $8.7 billion in the third quarter, while its advertising revenue dropped by nearly 10% to almost $9 billion.
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