Twitter to buy mobile advertising firm Namo Media

Twitter Inc. agreed to buy Namo Media Inc. as the microblogging website seeks to bolster its reach in mobile advertising.

Twitter announced the acquisition in a blog post, without releasing financial terms of the deal. The company's shares rose 4.6 percent to $34.41 in early afternoon on Wall Street.

As Twitter competes with Facebook and Google in the market for mobile ad dollars, the purchase of San Francisco-based Namo Media brings technology for native advertising, a strategy that blends ads with the rest of a website. Using its ad network, acquired in last year's purchase of MoPub, Twitter has said it can reach more than 1 billion phones.

"We have been working to bring native ads to mobile app publishers in order to create a more seamless and less intrusive ad experience for users," Twitter, also based in San Francisco, said Thursday in a statement.

Native advertising has become valuable as Internet users get more accustomed to ignoring the typical display and pop-up ads that appear on the edges of Web pages. A native ad in a news application could look like a promoted story, or a marketing message in a game could blend into the way it is played.