I started Taboola 9 years ago this month because I couldn’t find anything to watch on TV and I thought with so many choices, TV shows should actually find me. With the overwhelming amount of information in the world, I imagined there were billions of people in the same boat and saw an opportunity. The future would be a reverse version of what search engines solved. Instead of expecting people to search for information, we would create a way for information to find people in a curated and personalized way.
Our vision from day one was to build a new category called “Discovery” side by side to Search and Display, connecting people with information they may like and never knew existed.
We spent the first few years of Taboola focusing on cracking the code of recommending videos based on a user’s content consumption behavior. We’ve been fortunate to have seen meaningful growth as a company, pushing the boundaries of storytelling and finding that there is a magical moment that happens once someone finishes reading a story.
Today, we announced we’re acquiring the breakthrough outstream video company ConvertMedia, and we’re thrilled for three big reasons:
- People – Yoav, Gil and the team at ConvertMedia built an outstanding culture focused on passion, transparency and execution. I look forward to joining hands with the team. I’ve learned one thing in the past 9 years — it’s all about the people you get to work together with.
- Long term vision: We have an important goal in common with ConvertMedia: to become one of the top video/TV companies in the world. Leveraging our current reach of over a billion people a month, serving nearly 1.5 billion recommendations a day, we project that together we’ll stream over one billion videos a day and operate on the same scale as YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook.
- Full Native Funnel: As TV budgets are fast flowing to digital, the acquisition allows us to be a more strategic partner to our publishers. For the first time, we’ll be able to offer a full funnel solution to publishers, personalizing the right piece of information — regardless of format — (sponsored content or video) to the right user at the right time.
Here is an example of ConvertMedia on Salon.com:
Founded in 2008, ConvertMedia is an innovative Outstream video company with an extensive portfolio of video units. Outstream video represents a natural migration of top-of-the-funnel brand engagement from TV to desktop and mobile and we anticipate increasingly more brand advertising budget will be allocated in this direction versus the more limited traditional pre-roll. ConvertMedia has shaped this video technology and provided publishers with the intuitive tools they need to strike the ideal balance between monetization and enhancing the user experience for any given session. ConvertMedia’s top notch team has empowered leading publisher sites with the ability to leverage outstream video in ways that frame content with great respectability and encourage reader loyalty.
Here is an example of ConvertMedia Studio:
We began our journey at Taboola with video recommendations, so in many ways it’s even more exciting to be here today, bringing both our technologies and teams together to one big family, Taboolars.
We look forward to working together with our publisher and advertiser partners to deliver new experiences, connecting people with information they may like and never knew existed.