Time Inc. (TIME), the owner of Time, Fortune, and People magazines, has acquired Viant, the parent company of Myspace.

Joe Ripp, chairman and CEO of Time Inc., described the acquisition as “game changing” in a press release. 

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

For Time Inc., this acquisition is all about the data.  

Ad network Specific Media, another Viant-owned company, scooped up Myspace for $35 million in 2011. Its previous owner before that was News Corp, which bought Myspace for $580 million back in 2005.

In buying Myspace, Viant amassed a database of more than 1 billion registered users. While not all of those people may have kept the same email address from their Myspace days, it still has an enviable treasure trove of first-party data.

First-party data is considered the holy grail when it comes to advertising online because it means marketers know they are serving ads to the actual consumer they want to be targeting, rather than making probabilistic bets based on browsing behavior.

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