• Taboola is On a $100 Million Run Rate, Expanding Beyond Video Recommendations Roots

    Content recommendation provider Taboola, which I've been tracking since its early days, is now on a $100 million annual revenue run rate, according to co-founder and CEO Adam Singolda, whom I spoke to yesterday. It's the first time Taboola has revealed its revenue profile, and Adam also said the company has also been cash flow positive for several months.

    Taboola got its start helping content providers generate more video views on their sites by analyzing their own videos and the sites' users' behaviors and then adding a strip of recommended videos to help recirculate traffic. It then expanded by providing those recommendations to an ever-growing publisher network. In December, 2011, it applied the same underlying predictive technology to article recommendations and also began distributing these through its network. Adam said there are now over 1 million articles and videos, which are recommended 3 billion times/day.

    According to data Adam provided from Compete, in October, across its network, 24.2 million uniques clicked on Taboola's recommendations, driving a total of 55.9 million clicks. Taboola is paid each time a content provider's (aka advertiser's) article or video is clicked on. With the scale that article recommendations have brought, video revenue is now just 1/3 of Taboola's total.

    However, Adam pointed out that, per Compete, Taboola's 5th most active advertiser is actually a collection of video providers driving video viewing at YouTube. In addition, Taboola has found that content providers see a close relationship between users clicking on articles and subsequently watching videos too.

    Adam also noted that the Compete data shows Taboola surpassed its closest competitor Outbrain by about 5.8 million uniques and 350K page views in October. Underscoring Taboola's growth, Adam said in early 2012, it was just 1/30 the size of Outbrain.

    The areas of "content marketing" and "native advertising" in which Taboola operates are very hot these days as both content providers and advertisers seek new ways of driving viewership and monetization. Taboola has grown quickly and its adoption is helping prove the efficacy of its underlying recommendations technology.