Here is a number worth sitting with for a moment: $15 million in 2014, $1.2 billion in 2026. That is the story of what digital media company Ziff Davis did with Ookla, the Seattle-based company behind two tools that almost every internet user has clicked on at least once. Ziff Davis announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to sell its entire Connectivity division to global consulting giant Accenture for $1.2 billion in cash. In plain English, this means that the next time you visit Speedtest to check why your Netflix is buffering, or pull up Downdetector to find out whether your bank's app is actually broken or just your imagination, it will be Accenture collecting the data.
The deal, reported by Reuters, covers the full Ookla stable of products: Speedtest, Downdetector, Ekahau (a Wi-Fi planning tool used by enterprises), and RootMetrics (a mobile network benchmarking service). Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah noted in a statement that the Connectivity division generated $231 million in revenue in 2025, representing roughly 16 per cent of the company's overall sales. That is a remarkable return for a business that traces its roots to bolt-on acquisitions, including Ookla for $15 million in 2014 and RootMetrics in 2016.
The timing of the sale reflects both savvy corporate stewardship and a fair slice of good fortune. The unit capitalised on the global 5G rollout and a pandemic-driven surge in bandwidth demand, turning a modest connectivity data business into something with genuine enterprise value. Ookla's data platform is anchored by more than 250 million consumer-initiated tests per month, complemented by controlled drive, walk, and embedded testing options, giving it a data asset that telecoms companies and, increasingly, AI infrastructure providers are willing to pay serious money to access.
For Accenture, this is not a sentimental purchase. The Dublin-headquartered consulting firm has been on an acquisition spree, and this deal fits a clear strategic logic. Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said "modern networks have evolved from simple infrastructure into business-critical platforms" and that "without the ability to measure performance, organisations cannot optimise experience, revenue, or security," adding that the acquisition would help clients "scale AI safely and build the trusted data foundations they need." As AI scales, the insights captured at the network, device, and application layers are seen as essential for uses ranging from fraud prevention in banking to smart home analytics in utilities and traffic optimisation in retail, with Ookla's platform capturing more than 1,000 attributes per test to provide the foundation for those insights.
If that sounds like a lot of corporate jargon layered over what is essentially a very good internet speed test, you are not wrong to raise an eyebrow. The honest answer is that Accenture is betting that network performance data becomes as commercially valuable as financial data or health data as AI workloads explode. The company has also recently announced plans to acquire UK-based AI firm Faculty, a Palantir competitor, with Faculty's CEO Marc Warner subsequently brought on as Accenture's new chief technology officer. In February, Accenture said it would also acquire Verum Partners, an infrastructure and capital projects management firm based in South America. The Ookla deal is, in short, part of a broader and rapidly moving AI-data acquisition strategy.
Back at Ziff Davis, the rationale is equally clear. The company had $872 million in debt that it disclosed during its fourth-quarter earnings call two weeks ago, and the sale hands it a significant war chest to reduce that burden. The sale will allow Ziff Davis to focus on enthusiast websites like IGN and Mashable, as well as Everyday Health and iBuyNewCar. The move builds on a streamlining push by CEO Vivek Shah since 2017, which included the 2021 Consensus Cloud spin-off and the 2022 Policygenius insurance brokerage sale. The market responded with considerable enthusiasm: Ziff Davis shares rocketed around 81 per cent on the news, adding roughly $800 million to the company's market value, bringing it to $1.9 billion, while Accenture shares traded flat.
There is a legitimate question here about what changes for ordinary users. Both tools are free to consumers, and neither Accenture nor Ziff Davis has signalled any intention to alter that. But when a data-rich consumer platform moves into the hands of an enterprise consulting firm whose core business is selling intelligence to large corporations, it is reasonable to ask whose interests that platform ultimately serves. Ookla CEO Stephen Bye said the move would allow the company to "scale our premiere network data business across the world's largest enterprises" and "more effectively serve CSPs, AI infrastructure providers, edge data centres and enterprise networks." Consumer experience features in the corporate communications, but as a means to an end rather than the primary product.
The deal is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close within the coming months, with Accenture describing the acquisition as a step toward building end-to-end network intelligence capabilities. In the meantime, Ziff Davis will continue to operate Speedtest and Downdetector. The good news, for anyone who relies on either tool, is that they are not going anywhere. Whether the broader commercialisation of internet performance data is a cause for concern or simply the inevitable direction of a world where connectivity has become infrastructure is a question worth watching as the deal closes.