Last week, we kicked off the launch of the Taboola Feed with some of the best advertisers and publishers in the industry. At our celebratory kickoff in NYC, we broke bread and talked about the open web dynamics with Grant Whitmore, Executive Vice President of Digital at the New York Daily News (NYDN).
As we spoke with Grant, hundreds of guests toured our brand new New York City Headquarters, located just above Madison Square Park. While guests enjoyed their music, food and Thai-style ice cream, they listened to Grant and our Founder & CEO, Adam Singolda, discuss how the Feed will impact the open web.
“As a publisher that publishes nearly 200 pieces of content a day, we think that this is a great way to mingle discovery in our own platform,” Whitmore said.
“As we’ve activated Feed on the site, we’ve seen some pretty outstanding numbers. For those of you in the room, who are in fact Taboola clients, your revenue will go up.”
Taboola Feed saw a nice amount of media coverage, and many reporters made it to the event from outlets like AdWeek to technology blog like BestTechie, and more.
Here are some of the stories we saw about Taboola Feed from Ha Harets, Techcrunch, HuffingtonPost (video), and New York Daily News.
Our strategic partnership with the NYDN has allowed us to explore Taboola Feed’s impact on consumers and measure how they engaged with NYDN content, branded videos and native paid posts.
“We’re pretty excited about Feed and we’re excited to be a Beta partner,” Whitmore said. “Our ability to grab onto [users] and keep them in our ecosystem was limited.
“We’ve worked with Taboola for a long time, not just as a monetization partner but as a technology partner to help enable content discovery. When we first talked about the idea of Feed, I was super interested because it mirrored this activity that has become so dominant in our lives—which is just, scrolling, hoping that something catches your eye.”
After an initial test, NYDN saw engagement and retention rates jump—two things that according to Whitmore, are really challenging in the publisher environment.
Taboola Feed is revolutionizing the way we think about how users interact with the open web, bringing the social experience that users have already learned to love, and already spend 50 minutes with, on average each day. Still, our founder & CEO mentioned we have a long way to go and compared our status to the initial launch of the iPhone 1—it didn’t support simple things like copy and paste functionality, but it was clear that it would change the way people use mobile.
“The way I see it, the Taboola Feed as it is, is like the first iPhone,” Singolda said. “You see it, you know it’s revolutionary. You can touch it, but it’s not perfect yet. To make Taboola Feed perfect, we need to build an ecosystem around it.
“We invite you—startups, publishers, technology companies, app developers and more from around the world—to come be a part of the Taboola Card Store and feed marketplace.”
When we all come together, Taboola Feed will have built an impactful and engaging platform for everyone—users, publishers, and advertisers—on the open web.
Taboola is the world’s leading content discovery platform, serving 360B recommendations to over 1B unique visitors each month on the web’s most innovative publisher sites. To learn more about how Taboola can help you A/B test your site content, contact us.