Yesterday internet ad "infrastructure" firm Rubicon Project announced its acquisition of Others Online, an audience optimization firm.

This marks Rubicon's first-ever acquisition, and marks the company's desire to help web publishers leverage growing trends toward behavioral — that is, more granular — forms of user targeting.

"There are two new challenges facing the online ad industry; audience and data fragmentation," insisted CEO/Founder Franke Addante of the Rubicon project. "Advertisers need to connect directly with their audiences. Fragmentation has made it difficult for them to efficiently reach [them]. Further, the recent growth in the number of data companies in the market has created fragmentation at the data level."

He claimed Rubicon has "taken a giant step" toward solving audience fragmentation by becoming a central space for ad networks, publishers and audience rep firms to initiate transactions.

"The acquisition of Others Online will help us solve the data fragmentation challenge to the benefit of everyone connected to the Rubicon Project platform."

Others Online provides a number of audience data-related services, particularly an "affinity scoring" service that determines the strength of a person's interest in a given brand, product or topic.