Press Release

Rakuten LogoData Analytics Engine from Product Feed and Deals Content Aggregator Boosts Portfolio of Digital Marketing Assets

NEW YORK CITY – August 12, 2013 – Rakuten Marketing today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PopShops, a Seattle-based technology company that provides online advertisers and publishers with a data analytics engine for intelligent product feeds. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2006, the PopShops platform and tools enable more than 4,000 advertisers and 25,000 publishers, including comparison shopping sites, coupon portals, blogs, and loyalty programs to access the most up-to-date product information on millions of online retail products from a single source.

PopShops, now known as Rakuten PopShops, complements Rakuten Marketing’s portfolio of digital marketing technologies and services, which include: affiliate marketing, display, lead generation, loyalty, retargeting, and search marketing.

“Having built a long-standing partnership with PopShops, we were already impressed with the quality of its analytics engine and ability to help drive online sales,” said Yaz Iida, chief executive officer, Rakuten Marketing. “Through this acquisition, we’ll continue to outpace the competition and strengthen our assets across all of the vital areas of digital marketing that will benefit from PopShops’s powerful analytics engine.”

Using PopShops, advertisers are able to increase sales by distributing the most current product information to publishers. More specifically, when consumers are shopping online, the quality of the data feed directly influences the likelihood of purchase. Inaccurate, incomplete or outdated information results in lost sales. Yet being able to provide accurate and optimized information is an extremely time consuming process. This is why leading advertisers and publishers rely on PopShops to continuously provide refreshed product, coupon and deals information.

“PopShops started with a single focus on being the top product and coupon feed platform and in just a few years, we were able to draw the attention of thousands of brand name advertisers and publishers,” said Ashish Pandey, managing director, Rakuten PopShops. “Today we celebrate the results of our efforts and look forward to our continued success as part of the global Rakuten Marketing family.”

All Rakuten PopShops employees will remain with the company at its headquarters in Seattle and report into newly appointed Rakuten PopShops President Rohinee Mohindroo.

Rakuten Marketing provides advertisers and marketers with expert technology and services for affiliate marketing, retargeting, display, search marketing, lead generation, and loyalty. The company is headquartered in New York City and has offices in Australia, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and throughout the United States. As part of Rakuten, one of the world’s leading Internet service companies, Rakuten Marketing includes Rakuten LinkShare, the #1 ranked performance marketing network and Rakuten MediaForge, a leader in retargeting and display recognized for its pay-for-performance consumer engagement business model.

About Rakuten Rakuten, Inc. (JASDAQ: 4755), is one of the world’s leading Internet service companies, providing a variety of consumer- and business-focused services including e-commerce, e-reading, travel, banking, securities, credit card, e-money, portal and media, online marketing and professional sports. Selected by Forbes as 7th among the World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2012, Rakuten is expanding globally and currently has operations throughout Asia, Western Europe, and the Americas. Founded in 1997, Rakuten is headquartered in Tokyo, with over 10,000 employees worldwide. For more information, visit http://global.rakuten.com/corp/.