Analysis for 'Taboola'

• Taboola Raises $15 Million Series D Round

  Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 8:01 AM ET

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  Posted by Will Richmond

  Taboola has raised another $15 million, led by Pitango VC, bringing its total to date to $40 million. The Series D financing comes just 9 months after raising its last round of $10 million. Taboola will use the new funds for continued international expansion and product development. CEO and founder Adam Singolda told me the company has 70 employees currently and plans to double in size by the end of 2013.
  
  Taboola's roots are in providing recommendations for content providers to better promote their own video within their sites and also for third-party video to gain wider, targeted distribution. Over the past year Taboola has also leveraged its underlying EngageRank recommendations technology to quietly begin distributing article recommendations as well (I noticed these last month on WSJ.com).

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  Categories: Deals & Financings, Technology

  Topics: Pitango VC, Taboola

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

  Tuesday, June 26, 2012, 9:11 AM ET

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  Posted by Will Richmond

  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.

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  Categories: Deals & Financings, Video Search

  Topics: Taboola

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• Taboola's Video Recommendation Widget Reaching Over 64 Million U.S. Unique Users Per Month

  Thursday, November 10, 2011, 9:24 AM ET

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  Posted by Will Richmond
  Taboola's video recommendation widget is now placed on pages of content publisher web sites reaching over 64 million U.S. unique users per month, according to Quantcast data. Adam Singolda, Taboola's CEO explained that the 64 million amount means Taboola's exposure is ahead of the uniques at popular sites like Bing, Pandora and CNET, and just behind Twitter, Wikipedia and Amazon, again, according to Quantcast data (see chart below).
  

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  Categories: Research, Technology

  Topics: Quantcast, Taboola

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• USAToday.com Implements Taboola's Video Recommendations

  Thursday, December 2, 2010, 6:27 PM ET

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  Posted by Will Richmond
  USAToday.com has begun implementing video recommendations engine Taboola to power videos on all of its News pages. I confirmed with Taboola's CEO and founder Adam Singolda that USAToday.com is using the company's "Text2Video" product on its news pages currently and that a fuller rollout is planned, though he wouldn't provide further details.
  
  With the Text2Video product, Taboola analyzes web pages and uses its proprietary text algorithms to understand the content of those pages. This data is combined with cookies to gain insight into users' interests. Videos are then recommended based on this information using Taboola's EngageRank video solution.
  
  This is the 3rd big recent publisher win for Taboola, following both NYTimes.com and Bloomberg (additional customers include Demand Media, Revision3, Kiplingers and others). What's distinctive about the USAToday.com implementation is that the video recommendations are given the most prominent placement yet (see below), at the top of the right column with 3 thumbnails exposed. That's highly valuable page real estate, and it shows the confidence the USA Today team must have not only in the quality/relevance of the recommended videos, but also in their ability to deliver superior monetization.
  

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  Categories: Newspapers, Technology

  Topics: Taboola, USAToday.com

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• Taboola Is Providing Video Recommendations For NYTimes.com

  Tuesday, October 12, 2010, 9:22 AM ET

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  Posted by Will Richmond
  Taboola's EngageRank video recommendation technology has been officially adopted by the NYTimes.com, following a successful 8-month trial. NYTimes.com has implemented Taboola's recommendations in a section called "Other Videos You May Like" as thumbnails below the main player window and when the video ends. Taboola's CEO and founder Adam Singolda told me that based on A/B testing vs. other recommendations technologies, Taboola was found to drive 250% higher video views. Last week I met up with Adam and Lior Golan, who runs product and technology at the company and was in from Israel where he's based.
  

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  Categories: Newspapers, Technology

  Topics: NYTimes.com, Taboola

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• Bloomberg is Now Using Taboola's Video Recommendations

  Thursday, July 29, 2010, 10:03 AM ET

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  Posted by Will Richmond
  Browsing the web last week, I noticed that Bloomberg.com is now incorporating videos throughout its site from Taboola, the video recommendations engine. If you click on any article on the site, in the lower part of the right column you'll see several thumbnails of recommended videos (here's an example from an article today about Motorola's earnings). When you click any video you're then brought to a playback page, which has additional recommended videos (see below).  
  
  
  

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  Categories: Syndicated Video Economy, Technology

  Topics: Bloomberg, Taboola

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• Taboola Aims to Crack Video Recommendations Nut

  Thursday, February 5, 2009, 8:53 AM ET

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  Posted by Will Richmond

  For Internet-based content, recommendations have to be one of the toughest nuts to crack. There are just so many variables in play - analyzing and characterizing the initial piece of content consumed, building a large enough database of content to match it against, understanding individual user's peculiarities, presenting results in a meaningful way, etc. Still, effective recommendations are powerful because they enhance the user's experience, increase consumption and drive more ad inventory.

  One company trying to crack the recommendations nut for video content is Israel-based Taboola. I recently caught up with their CEO/founder Adam Singolda to learn more about their approach and progress. The company's ViDiscovery system analyzes both the content provider's video and its users' behaviors. The combination of the two then drives Taboola's recommendations, which can be presented in a number of different formats depending on the content provider's preferences.

  You can see several examples of the recommendations in action. At CNN.com, a little tab in the bottom left of the video window prompts for "Videos Like This" which in turn opens a horizontal scroll bar with recommended videos. In some cases the recommendation work very well, matching specific news stories with one another. But in other cases the experience was mixed. For example, when watching a video about the "Zooz Beat" music app the first recommended video was an update about Hurricane Gustav from August '08 and the second was about a refinery workers' strike in the U.K. Hmm, if there's a correlation between the three videos, I'm not sure I see it.

  Still, Taboola's team has an impressive pedigree and has raised $6M to date, plenty for a small team to continue refining its algorithms and results. The company's primary model is ad-based, with it receiving a revenue share for incremental video viewing that it drives. That kind of success-based approach will endear it to resource-constrained content providers eager to generate additional usage and revenues without extra expense. It's easy to implement Taboola by just adding a line of code to the player or web site.

  High-quality recommendations are not easy to pull off, but if Taboola can get its system really humming with demonstrable case studies of success it could gain very quick traction.

  What do you think? Post a comment now.

  Categories: Startups, Technology

  Topics: Taboola

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