• Taboola Raises $10 Million Series C Round, Doubles Monthly Users

    Video recommendations provider Taboola has announced a $10 million Series C financing this morning led by Marker LLC. With the new round, total capital raised to date is $24 million. Proceeds will be used for international expansion and product development.

    Taboola's EngageRank now delivers 500 million recommendations per day to 130 million monthly users for publishers such as WSJ, NY Times, CNN, The Hollywood Reporter, USA Today and others. Monthly users have doubled since last November, when Taboola had 64 million users in the U.S. User growth likely reflects increased penetration with U.S. publishers, and also international growth in countries such as Germany (where Taboola recently announced a deal with OMS, a consortium of 30 newspapers), England, Israel, Brazil, France and Poland.

    Some publishers use Taboola to create recommendations solely out of their own video content, while others use it to syndicate in third-party video from multiple external sources. EngageRank generates recommendations by analyzing users' behaviors with video and the videos' own characteristics. Recommendations typically appear in thumbnails adjacent to the publisher's primary content.

    High-quality recommendations are notoriously difficult to deliver, and Taboola's ability to sign up so many top-notch publishers is a clear validation of its technology. Taboola is also benefiting from a few critical trends in the market including users' appetite for online video, strong video advertising rates and publishers' motivation to improve their products by presenting a curated collection of relevant videos. I expect all of these trends will only intensify going forward, positioning Taboola well for continued rapid growth.

    (Note: VideoNuze uses Taboola's recommendations)

    Beet.tv has a good interview below with Taboola's CEO Adam Singolda.