Five years ago I met David Kenny, who had then just became the CEO of The Weather Company. Taboola was much smaller back then, and it was his innovative and driven company culture that helped us kick off a strategic alliance that has grown.
We started tactically with goals for revenue, engagement and editorial metrics, to today’s even more strategic relationship—I’m excited to announce that The Weather Company, an IBM Business, is our first Taboola Feed card partner.
We launched Taboola Feed in May of 2017, our own version of the social feed experience for the open web. In essence, it’s an infinite feed that uses Taboola’s proprietary algorithm to surface personalized information in a variety of “card” formats—including video, re-circulated editorial content, sponsored recommendations, and third-party cards such as the weather card we are developing together.
Part of our strategy in launching Taboola Feed was to build an ecosystem of amazing experiences that users would not only love and enjoy, but also could help engage them more on publishers’ sites. People then linger on a publisher’s feed, versus clicking back to their social feed.
Put simply, I would rather people interact with the open web than within a walled garden.
We are truly excited to announce that The Weather Company, the world’s most accurate forecaster, and Taboola’s weather card will become available to every publisher in the world working with the Taboola Feed—users can now check the weather wherever they may be. The Weather Card will provide forecasts for up to five days and provide opportunities for users to customize the forecast outlook based on their location.
We’ve always shared a mission to create meaningful, personalized experiences for billions of people. To that end, bringing over a billion people around the world access to the most reliable and localized weather information is an exciting milestone for both of us.
We share the belief that timeliness is what’s most important for the user:
“The weather informs every part of a person’s day and we share Taboola’s passion for using innovation to surface the most relevant, timely content for users when and where they need it.
Integrating a Weather Card from The Weather Channel within the Taboola Feed allows us to reach a significantly broader audience than before.”
– Sheri Bachstein, global head of consumer business, The Weather Company
weather.com has launched the Taboola Feed.
As part of our strategic announcement, we’re also sharing that the popular weather information destination, weather.com, will switch some pages from our traditional widget to Taboola Feed on its sites across the globe in an expansion of our current alliance together.
This launch follows impressive momentum in Taboola Feed adoption. Currently,Taboola Feed serves 140 million video views per day, in 242 countries, and partners with 15,000 brands.. Many premium publishers have seen unprecedented success since implementing Taboola Feed including: NYDN, TMBI, Bauer, El Universal, and more.
Empowering editorial teams with actionable data—they’ve already run thousands of A/B Tests with Newsroom.
Beyond the integration of Taboola Feed, we’ve worked extensively with The Weather Company’s editorial staff on Taboola Newsroom—empowering them with insights from our network, as well as providing A/B test capabilities in real time to help optimize the content to improve site engagement and grow traffic and site engagement.
Taboola Newsroom’s integrations with third parties like Reddit also help editorial teams at companies like The Weather Company to participate in conversations around their content. With Taboola Newsroom, editors can subscribe to alerts with recommended actions to increase readership, engagement, and improve homepage content, and help make the most of their content.
As we dive deeper and deeper into this industry as a company, it excites me to have the opportunity to work with major publishers like weather.com on new projects—like cards for the Taboola Feed—but to also have the opportunity to work together across all departments.
We’re optimistic about a future that is completely personalized across all screens, connecting consumers with information they may like and never knew existed.
This is just the beginning.