Dive Brief:

• Los Angeles-based price comparison and marketing company Connexity has acquired price-comparison site PriceGrabber.

• Shopzilla Inc. rebranded to Connexity in 2014 when it was sold last year and still runs Shopzilla as a stand-alone price-comparing site.

• PriceGrabber, in addition to its price-comparison tool, provides retailers with data and analytics and runs a cost-per-click (CPC) marketplace in the U.S. and U.K.

Dive Insight:

When 19-year-old Shopzilla rebranded to Connexity last year it was a signal of its greater ambitions, but one analyst says that the consolidation in the industry shows the weakness in the price comparison space.

“Consolidation is an indictment of the entire industry’s failure to innovate and evolve past search arbitrage, completely ignoring mobile,” e-commerce services firm CPC Strategy told VentureBeat. “Given the decline of the search arbitrage model, the only way we see long-term viability in the space for Nextag and/or Connexity is if they can figure out how to leverage their consumer purchase intent data to provide targeting data for programmatic advertisers.”