Adobe today announced that it plans to acquire Livefyre, the service that’s probably best known for its online commenting system. On top of this service, the company also offers a number of tools for brands to engage with their audiences as well, which is likely what Adobe was most interested in.
Adobe plans to integrate Livefyre into its Experience Manager, its content management service for building web sites and basic mobile apps. ” Livefyre will be part of Adobe Experience Manager and integrated across Adobe Marketing Cloud to make user-generated content available across all eight digital marketing solutions,” the company writes in today’s announcement.
Livefyre says its customers include the likes of CNN, The Coca-Cola Company and Major League Baseball. Given the company’s reach, chances are quite a few of its customers are also currently Adobe customers as well (through its Experience Manger, but also its Marketing Cloud).
Livefyre was founded in 2009. At the time, it was mostly a straightforward commenting platform. Over time, the company then added marketing tools on top of this, but at its core, the service is still about user-generated content (and most of that content is still generated in the comments sections of the blogs that use it).
To go beyond comments, Livefyre also acquired the likes of Storify and launched its Livefyre Studio product to curate user-generated content and republish it.
The company raised a total of $67.3 million since its launch. Adobe participated in its last $47 million round (as did Salesforce), so the two companies were already quite familiar with each other.
“As the leader in digital experiences, Adobe helps brands create amazing content with Creative Cloud and then deliver and optimize those experiences using Adobe Marketing Cloud,” said Aseem Chandra, the vice president for Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Target, in today’s announcement. “With this acquisition our customers will be able to unify the best social media content with branded experiences created in Adobe Creative Cloud and community-driven content in Adobe Behance and Adobe Stock.”
Livefyre says its services will continue to work as usual for the time being.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Adobe says it expects the deal to close within the next few months.
Comment