Content recommendation firm Outbrain paid at least $9.5m for Visual Revenue

Earlier this month, New York-based content recommendation and discovery technology company Outbrain announced its acquisition of Visual Revenue, which offers tools to help editors in data-driven newsrooms produce better content through real-time analytics.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a recent regulatory filing shows that Outbrain coughed up at least $9.5 million to complete the merger between the two companies.

The SEC filing only shows how much stock issued in relation to the transaction, but it doesn’t tell us if and how much cash was involved, hence why we still don’t know if this was the full purchase price or not.

Oftentimes, acquirers require bought companies to reach certain financial or other milestones before unlocking payments, and we also don’t know if any earn-out provisions were part of the Outbrain-Visual Revenue deal.

Here’s how Outbrain pitched the acquisition:

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As fans of great journalism, we strongly believe in the important role the editor plays in the newsroom and we have worked hard to provide editorial tools and insights to help them do their jobs better. We continue to look for ways to help empower editorial decisions with actionable insights using data and analytics.

By merging Outbrain and Visual Revenue, we are combining the largest platform in the content discovery space with the leading platform for editorial decision support.

This will offer publishers an unparalleled end-to-end solution for optimizing all of their content pages across any channel, screen size and device, with both automated and editorially-controlled solutions.

For Outbrain, this was the third acquisition to date.

The company has raised $64 million in funding, most recently closing a $35 million round from Index Ventures, Carmel Ventures and Lightspeed back in December 2011.

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