Facebook buys video ad platform LiveRail

LiveRail co-founder and CEO, Mark Trefgarne

Facebook as agreed to buy online video advertising platform LiveRail in an effort to make video ads “much better for everyone.”

Announcing the move, Facebook’s vice president of ads and product marketing, Brian Boland, said that LiveRail, Facebook and the premium publishers it serves have “an opportunity to make video ads better and more relevant for the hundreds of millions of people who watch digital video every month.”

He said this would benefit marketers, publishers as well as providing more engaging ads for people watching online video.

Founded in 2007, LiveRail is an ad technology company that works with firms like ABC Family, A&E Networks, Gannett, and Dailymotion to serve better ads in the videos that appear on their websites and apps.

LiveRail provides marketers with access to premium video inventory and the information that they need to decide where to show their ads – offering a “complete advertising solution for video publishers.”

“When we started talking to the team at Facebook about how we could work together, it quickly became clear that we shared a vision for th

e future of digital advertising,” said LiveRail co-founder and CEO Mark Trefgarne.

“They believed, as we do, that publishers deserve a new generation of audience-aware advertising technology. We realised that by joining forces we’d be able to draw upon our respective strengths to move even faster towards our shared vision of creating the advertising platform of the future.”

LiveRail has 170 employees across four offices and claims hundreds of active customers, delivering more than 7 billion video ads each month.

According to eMarketer stats,  digital video advertising in the US will increase 41.9% this year, reaching US$5.96 billion.

In the US, Facebook accounted for 18.4% market share of digital display advertising in 2013, according to eMarketer, up from 14.8% in 2012, overtaking Google for the first time for share of all US display ad revenues.