News Corp could be heading towards a sizeable payday, after Sky News in the UK reported the Murdoch-owned company has hired bankers to assist with the sale of its ad tech platform Unruly.
News Corp only completed the acquisition of the London-based Unruly in 2015, purchasing it for £114m ($206m), in what was touted by the media giant as a move that would “extend our expertise in the digital and mobile video area”.
Almost exactly four years later and News Corp appears to be done with the ad tech platform, which supplies video advertising services and manages the company’s digital advertising inventory.
Sky News reported News Corp has hired US-based investment bank Needham to advise on the sale.
Although News Corp acquired Unruly relatively recently, Sky News said insiders were still divided as to what the current value of the ad tech company would be.
Unruly opened its Australian office in 2015.
And while the potential sale of Unruly would no doubt be, at least partly, attributed to the dominance of Facebook and Google in the video advertising space, News Corp does not wish to simply bow down to these tech giants.
Last month it announced plans for a news aggregation platform to be named ‘Knewz’, aimed at giving smaller publishers more of a voice and competing with Google News.
