Perion extends Microsoft deal, ups mobile business

This article originally appeared in Times of Israel

Israel’s Perion Networks is extending its agreement with Microsoft’s Bing search service, meaning Bing will keep powering search in Perion products for desktop and mobile platforms. The deal, announced Friday, extends the partnership between the two companies at least through the end of 2017.

With the deal, Perion becomes Bing’s prime — and only — partner for search on desktops and tablets in the US, as well as mobile platforms. Under the deal, Perion will pay Bing a percentage of the money it earns from clicks on its software products, among them mail add-on software IncrediMail.

Perion has quietly grown into an online monetization empire. Bing isn’t Perion’s only search partner. The company has deals with Yahoo and Ask.com, and for the past several years has had an arrangement with Google, as well, though Perion said it would opt out of that agreement at the end of August, because “revenues from Google are no longer material to Perion.” Last year Perion acquired Israeli company Conduit’s ClientConnect toolbar business for $660 million. Earlier this year, the company expanded abroad, acquiring San Francisco-based Grow Mobile, which allows businesses to buy mobile ads and keep track of their effectiveness from a single dashboard. The deal, Perion said, was worth as much as $42 million.

Perion had been chiefly a consumer-oriented software company. IncrediMail is a free program that provides backgrounds, emoticons, signatures, animations, and more for both POP and web mail accounts, and Smilebox lets users share personal media (photos, videos, music) and content types (greetings, invitations, slideshows, scrapbooks, photo albums, collages and more) via any sharing method (email, print, burn to DVD, post to Facebook, blog, Twitter or SMS). Other products include Photojoy, which converts photos into collages, puzzles and screensavers; Molto, a mobile email app, and instant messaging service SweetIM.

The Grow Mobile deal was designed to change Perion’s focus from consumer desktop products for mobile development, to providing app developers with a single dashboard to buy, track, optimize, and scale advertising campaigns, The Bing partnership is another step in that direction, said Danielle Ullner, Perion VP of search partnerships. “We are committed to providing app developers with great solutions, and working with Microsoft and Bing.com is an important part of that solution. We are particularly excited by the fact that mobile is part of our agreement and that together we are focused on building out our end-to-end technology platform for developers across all devices.

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