Adobe to acquire Livefyre

Adobe today said it is acquiring Livefyre, the service probably best known for its online commenting system. The service also offers a number of tools for brands to engage with their audiences, which is likely what Adobe is 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 wrote in its announcement today.

According to Livefyre, its customers included the likes of CNN, Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball. According to commentators, given the company's reach, chances were good that its customers were also currently Adobe customers (through its Experience Manger, but also its Marketing Cloud).

Livefyre, which was founded in 2009, was at the time was mostly a straightforward commenting platform. It went on to add marketing tools on top of this, but continued as a service that was essentially about user-generated content, with most of the content still generated in the comments sections of the blogs that used it.

According to Jordan Kretchmer, Livefyre founder and CEO, the deal was necessary for Livefyre to achieve its next phase of growth.

''Because of Adobe's incredible platform and footprint with marketers, we'll be able to quickly expand to provide user-generated content and user-engagement tools to a larger customer base,'' Kretchmer said yesterday, mediapost.com reported.

The two companies had late last year, worked together to help businesses create and deliver content and digital experiences on their owned properties and campaigns.

Also, earlier in 2015, Adobe and Salesforce Ventures led a $47 million investment in Livefyre.

According to commentators, brands were increasingly looking to building their own social-friendly properties rather than depending on Facebook or Twitter for their community-building efforts and for good reason.

Forrester Research had shown that US online adults were nearly three times more likely to visit a brand's web site than to engage them on Facebook.