Marissa Mayer's Latest Buy: Video Ad Platform BrightRoll

Yahoo will acquire BrightRoll, a company that provides an advertising platform for online video, the company announced in a blog post. The price is being reported as $640 million.

CEO Marissa Mayer said that video is one of the four core pillars of Yahoo's business strategy, alongside mobile, social, and native advertising, and claimed htat Brightroll is on track to pull in more than $100 million in revenues this year. The company serves as a middleman between video content publishers and advertisers, aggregating video from many sites then allowing advertisers to buy ads on that video programmatically.

She also revealed that she expects Tumblr to become a $100 million business for Yahoo next year. Mayer has been criticized for spending more than $1 billion to buy Tumblr last year, as the deal doesn't seem to be paying off. As Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson reported last month, Mayer plans to turn Tumblr into a video site along the lines of YouTube, and the Brightroll acquisition could help Yahoo make money from that plan. With BrightRoll, Yahoo now has the largest video advertising platform in the U.S., the company claims.

Here are some more details about Brightroll from Yahoo's blog post:

• BrightRoll powers digital video advertising for the world's largest brands and agencies, including 87 of the AdAge Top 100 US advertisers, all of the top 15 advertising agencies, and all 10 of the leading demand-side platforms

• BrightRoll served more video ads and reached more consumers in the US in 2014 than any other platform, according to comScore

• Tens of thousands of sites and apps send approximately two billion requests per day to BrightRoll to monetize the inventory they worked hard to create