To me this looks like typical ad industry consolidation. It's part of the eternal circle of advertising: when a new ad format shows up (radio, TV, web, mobile, etc) a zillion little companies pop up. Twenty years later there are just a handful of big players.
Unity made the choice to get into ads quite a few years ago when they acquired a company called Applifier. They ended up doing really well in mobile ads. IronSource, similarly, has done pretty well. But they're now competing with companies like Google, Facebook and Apple who have way more weight to throw around. At the least, if Unity had not done this acquisition, it leaves IronSource to be acquired or merged with someone else.
You could say, why is Unity in the ad business at all? But they're in way too deep to back out now. Ads are a huge chunk of their revenue. Trying to gobble up smaller competitors just makes sense in terms of trying to be one of the eventual survivors.
Unity made the choice to get into ads quite a few years ago when they acquired a company called Applifier. They ended up doing really well in mobile ads. IronSource, similarly, has done pretty well. But they're now competing with companies like Google, Facebook and Apple who have way more weight to throw around. At the least, if Unity had not done this acquisition, it leaves IronSource to be acquired or merged with someone else.
You could say, why is Unity in the ad business at all? But they're in way too deep to back out now. Ads are a huge chunk of their revenue. Trying to gobble up smaller competitors just makes sense in terms of trying to be one of the eventual survivors.