Zeta Adds 235 Million Emails to Database With LiveIntent Purchase
By: Christiana Sciaudone
Zeta Global, a marketing technology company, bought LiveIntent, an email-marketing platform this week for $250 million.
That means that New York-based Zeta acquired more than 235 million unique hashed email addresses compiled from places like The New York Times and Dotdash Meredith, bolstering the former’s 242 million-plus Zeta IDs around the world, according to Morgan Stanley. LiveIntent has by far the greatest number of email addresses outside of big tech, according to Dan Oshinsky, who runs Inbox Collective, an email consultancy, and that puts the new company just below the likes of Meta and Google in terms of data.
“The idea with this merger is, as I understand it, relatively simple. Let’s create, outside of Google and Meta, the biggest possible information graph on the planet,” Oshinsky told A Media Operator. “Let’s try to create a resource that has access to all of this data about all of these users, but that is, unlike Google or Meta, isn’t controlled by one company.”
The newly combined company will provide advertisers with far greater scale in the inbox with better targeting, making email a more compelling place for marketing. And because LiveIntent handles email monetization for so many publishers, it could result in a bump in revenue for publishers with advertisers more inclined to spend.
LiveIntent has compiled anonymized data from more than 2,000 publishers, including relationships with some of the most highly trafficked sites on the internet, who use its services to better target ads in their newsletters. The deal will improve the quality of intent and drive a more successful match rate, according to Morgan Stanley. Zeta will now enter the publisher monetization business and introduce a new product, the Publisher Cloud.
“Zeta’s new Publisher Cloud creates a closed loop ecosystem that will rival the reach and targeting capabilities of walled gardens,” Zeta said in a presentation to investors.
Neither LiveIntent nor Zeta responded to requests for additional comment.
“Major players are waking up to the power of email and newsletters to power first-party, data-based monetization strategies,” said Ryan Sager, a media consultant. “This looks like a really smart acquisition for Zeta. LiveIntent has long had one of the top identity solutions on the market. For publishers, what remains to be seen is whether Zeta can offer something truly compelling to help them claw back some of the revenue they’ve lost to Big Tech in the last decade.”
LiveIntent “is a complementary platform we can seamlessly integrate into the Zeta Marketing Platform within six months,” David Steinberg, chief executive officer of Zeta said in a statement this week. “This acquisition is immediately accretive to earnings and priced at a highly attractive Adjusted EBITDA multiple of ~16x. We already have interest from Zeta customers in our largest verticals for cross selling opportunities, and we believe these synergies can accelerate LiveIntent’s growth while continuing Zeta’s strong organic growth rates.”
The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter.
