Opera announced today that it has acquired mobile advertising firm AdMarvel. Opera says the acquisition will enable it to expand its portfolio of products and services to include "highly scalable ad monetization services" for Opera branded mobile products and services.

"In our fast-growing industry, mobile advertising represents an interesting long-term revenue opportunity. Every month, nearly 50 million people access the Web using Opera on their mobile phones and together with AdMarvel, we think we can play an important role in the evolution of mobile advertising," says Opera CEO Lars Boilesen.

AdMarvel is based in San Mateo, California. It was founded in 2006, and works with a lot of different advertising firms around the world. It's official description says:

AdMarvel makes mobile advertising work by enabling mobile publishers and operators to easily source, provision, manage and track advertising from virtually any ad network or direct sourced advertising inventory. As the leading trusted third party in mobile advertising, AdMarvel works with mobile publishers, developers, carriers, ad networks, agencies and advertisers to optimize advertising inventory and revenue. AdMarvel services work across mobile web, WAP, SMS and in-application modalities.

"We are very excited about joining forces with Opera," says AdMarvel CEO Mahi de Silva. "What started as a commercial relationship has blossomed into a wonderful partnership to serve the global mobile marketplace. Combining our monetization and analytics platform with the Opera browser and widget platform will create a new intelligent platform, where local and global advertisers can interact with a highly instrumented mobile audience."

Mobile advertising firms are being bought up like hotcakes. Other recent deals include Google acquiring AdMob and Apple acquiring Quattro. The Opera AdMarvel deal is reportedly for $8 million in cash plus a $15 million earnout.
 

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