Seven years ago, we started Taboola, believing that there would be times when we will be overwhelmed with information. Search engines would remain efficient when we know what we are looking for, while in other times, recommendations of different types would help us curate experiences we may like but never knew existed.
Our vision was and remains to build a new category, side by side to Search, called Discovery. Instead of people looking for information, have information look for people. Think of everything you could find using a search engine, and then imagine the process in reverse; we envision a world where information is personalized and recommended to you at the right place, and at the right time.
Predicting what people may like and never knew existed is no easy task. We spent the first 4.5 years focusing just on cracking the code on how to recommend videos. Then, leveraging the mathematical innovation we developed to recommend videos, we spent the past 2.5 years expanding into articles and slideshows, now serving 150 billion recommendations to 400 million unique users every month.
Pursuing our vision to expand the Discovery category and help publishers tap into new markets beyond paid videos, articles, and galleries (Content Marketing) — we’re excited to announce that we will start recommending Products/Services. To launch our 4th iteration of recommended information (articles, videos, galleries, and now products/services), we’re thrilled to share that we’ve acquired a company called Perfect Market.
In the past seven years, Perfect Market’s talented team has developed a disruptive technology that can take existing real estate on a publisher’s site used for performance text advertising and generate an exciting incremental revenue out of the same space. Perfect Market products can be seen today on some of the most innovative and premium sites across the Web such as Tribune, The Washington Post, Fox Broadcasting, and many others. Marrying Perfect Market’s technology with Taboola’s recommendation technology, and fueling it with Taboola’s Native Advertising budgets/ demand — enabled us to launch Taboola-X. A disruptive Programmatic product, Taboola-X combines both performance text advertising (products/services) and Native advertising (articles, videos, galleries), yielding the best of both worlds for users and publishers.
We’ve seen that when Taboola recommends content at the bottom of an article, people have a mindset of discovering additional interesting content. Taboola-X will enable publishers to place IAB/customized units beyond the bottom of article, such as on the right rail, or at the top of the page – and recommend the best of both markets: a product/service users may want to buy or content from around the Web. A brand new type of Performance/Native Programmatic offering.
Together with our publisher partners, we’re excited to tap into a $10B performance commerce/services advertising market and, united with Perfect Market’s team, roll out Taboola-X in the coming months. On the demand side, we’ll soon enable marketers to promote products/services on publisher sites using Taboola-X. Marketers can now address the full purchase-funnel, promote content to drive awareness and consideration of their products, and later, promote products to allow interested users to purchase them. All through Taboola-X.
We’re excited to have the Perfect Market team join the Taboola family, and together, work on offering a “full page monetization” opportunity for publishers, recommending videos, articles, galleries and now products/services from around the Web.
Because We Recommend.
