• by Wayne Friedman , Yesterday

Private equity-owned Nielsen is buying publicly traded digital media measurement and verification researcher DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion in cash.

The selling price at $13.60 a share represents a 30% premium to DoubleVerify’s average stock price over the past 60 days, according to the companies.

DoubleVerify stock closed down 2.3% on Thursday to $11.71.

“Joining forces with DoubleVerify will extend our capabilities deeper into the digital media industry, ensuring that the spend flowing between buyers and sellers is reaching real people in brand-suitable environments, through verified channels,” said Karthik Rao, Chief Executive Officer of Nielsen, in a statement.

Mark Zagorski, Chief Executive Officer of DoubleVerify, said: “DoubleVerify's MRC-accredited quality signals, in combination with Nielsen’s deduplicated cross-screen audience measurement, will fuel genuine market innovation – a single currency that scores media on both audience delivery and media environment quality.”

On Thursday DoubleVerify reported a 3% increase in second-quarter revenue to $193.8 million.

Revenue came from three areas: activation, down 1% to $107.7 million; measurement, up 6% to $66.8 million; and supply-side business, 13% higher to $19.3 million.

DoubleVerify is known for research that identifies and blocks ad fraud -- including “invalid” traffic supplied by bots, spoofing and fake impressions.

It also measures standard viewability in terms of whether at least 50% of an ad's pixels are visible on screen for at least one to two consecutive seconds.

In addition, its research focuses on brand-safety issues -- ensuring that ads are not placed next to inappropriate content including hate speech, violence, fake news or adult material.