Etsy has acquired Adtuitive, a contextual advertising service that matches retailers' inventory with content sites. Adtuitive used to advertise itself as a service that automatically scanned retail clients' product catalogs and generated ads with prices and thumbnails for placement on publisher sites. Ads were automatically generated from the most current product inventory, with no integration required, and included deep links directly to product landing pages.

A log-in page containing no information about the company or its services now greets visitors to the Adtuitive website.

Esty spokesperson Adam Brown said the acquisition is "not going to be a plug-and-play situation." The five members of the Adtuitive team are joining Etsy, and Mr. Brown said they possess a set of skills that will be applied to improve Etsy's search functionality and the Showcase, Etsy's internal advertising system. Brown said Etsy does not have plans to create a program like Google AdWords.

According to the Etsy blog post introducing the five "crafty coders," their technical expertise is in algorithmic search, machine learning and data interpretation, and advertising infrastructure. "In other words, five really smart guys who can help Etsy accelerate progress towards our longer-term goals."