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Yahoo announced Monday that it had agreed to acquire Flurry, a mobile ad and analytics company.

Flurry’s analytics are used by 170,000 developers globally, and the deal will give Yahoo important strategic insights into how various apps are used on the 1.4 billion mobile devices on which Flurry runs. (Facebook gained similar insights when it bought Onavo, another leading analytics company, last year.

Flurry’s advertising expertise could help Yahoo as it tries to build a meaningful mobile ad business. Although more than half of Yahoo’s monthly audience visits come on mobile devices, revenue from mobile ads is still so small that the company does not break it out.

In a statement announcing the deal, Yahoo said it was committed to maintaining and improving Flurry’s services for third-party developers.

The acquisition price was around $300 million, according to two people close to the companies.

Yahoo currently doesn’t sell mobile ads beyond its own apps. Buying Flurry, which has advertising deals with about 8,000 apps, gives the web giant an entry into that broader world, where Google, Facebook and Twitter are all competing for customers.

“It’s a way for Yahoo to spread its wings much more broadly into the mobile ecosystem,” said Scott Burke, Yahoo’s senior vice president for advertising technology, in an interview. “It enables a lot of the mobile app developers out there to get access not just to analytics but also a blend of Yahoo’s mobile monetization solutions.”

Simon Khalaf, chief executive of Flurry, said that many small app developers rely on his company’s demographic data about their users to present to advertisers. Yahoo will bring not just additional data, but also connections to many more advertisers.

Google, Twitter and Facebook are making similar efforts to sell ads beyond their own apps, both through acquisitions and internal product development.

Yahoo, long a laggard in mobile, is now trying to play catchup.