Twitter, fresh off its purchase of TweetDeck, has picked up another tool to help turn on the revenue spout for its microblogging services: It has bought AdGrok, a company that eases small businesses into the world of online advertising.
The offer from Twitter, reportedly for less than $10 million, according to VentureBeat, apparently swept the San Francisco startup founders right up out of their sneakers.
“When Twitter approached us and asked if we’d be interested in working on their monetization platform, we realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we just couldn’t pass up,” Matthew McEachen, one of the Silicon Valley vets who cofounded AdGrok, wrote on the company blog Wednesday. The company, as of yesterday, was already working on Twitter’s revenue engineering team, he said.
The deal is expected to bolster the microblogging site’s “monetization platform” by creating a more robust advertising platform for clients who wish to promote their messages through Twitter.
Based in San Francisco, AdGrok was backed by the incubator Y Combinator, and it has received buzz as being one of the hot startups coming out of the Silicon Valley, and one that built its business model around one of the larger tech companies out there, namely Google. Its mission is to serve as tour guide through the labyrinth of Google’s AdWords service for businesses—often small businesses—that use the often-puzzling system for their online advertising campaigns.