Popshops Comes to Rakuten

Prepare for a heavy round of consolidation in the performance marketing space.

Rakuten has just announced the acquisition of PopShops, a relatively popular platform that provides online advertisers and publishers with a data analytics engine to display merchant product feeds. More than 4,000 advertisers and 25,000 publishers (typically comparison shopping sites, coupon portals, blogs, and loyalty programs) currently leverage the platform and its suite of tools to access product information on retail products.

"Having built a long-standing partnership with PopShops, we were already impressed with the quality of its analytics engine and ability to help drive online sales," said Yaz Iida, chief executive officer, Rakuten Marketing. "Through this acquisition, we'll continue to outpace the competition and strengthen our assets across all of the vital areas of digital marketing that will benefit from PopShops's powerful analytics engine."

Popshops joins other well-known brands in the internet services space from Rakuten including performance marketing network Linkshare and retargeting and display network MediaForge. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.