Taboola Launches Next-Generation Native Ad Server, Powering Facebook-Like Branded Content Recommendations for Premium Publishers

‘Taboola Native’ Maximizes the Monetization Potential of Premium Native Placements, Opening New Direct-Sales Channels and Guaranteeing 100% High-Quality Fill Rates

NEW YORK, March 17, 2016 – Taboola®, the leading global discovery platform, today unveiled its latest innovation for the native advertising market. “Taboola Native,” a free and white-labelled version of the company’s predictive technology, enables publishers to maximize the monetization potential of premium native placements, opening new direct-sales channels and guaranteeing 100% high-quality fill rates from Taboola’s sponsored content marketplace for any unsold inventory.

Global publishers currently using Taboola Native include DailyMail.com, American Media, Inc. (publisher of Radar Online, OK! Magazine, and Men’s Fitness), New York Daily News, and Trusted Media Brands, Inc. (publisher of Reader’s Digest and Taste of Home) in the US; ESI Media (publisher of The Independent and London Evening Standard) and Trinity Mirror plc in Europe; and Bhaskar, Jagran, NDTV, and OneIndia in Asia-Pacific.

These collaborations represent the first wave of digital publishers to expand the purview of “native” beyond custom content (created by in-house studios). As opposed to traditional native advertising servers, Taboola Native provides a new platform for publishers to directly sell and promote not only custom content initiatives, but also “off-site” branded content from across the web, drawing from corporate microsites and blogs, YouTube channels, social media pages, and more. Many brands have spent several years investing in branded content, and are now spending millions of dollars looking for new ways to promote those stories to the right audiences.

Powered by the company’s predictive technology, Taboola Native can index and recommend thousands of branded content items, matching each user with the most impactful piece of content at the right time. Taboola Native supports both CPC- and CPM-based monetization models, along with post-click optimization such as cost-per-action and pages-per-session, and guarantees premium backfill from the largest sponsored content marketplace in the world.

“DailyMail.com’s Story Blaster unit allows advertisers to align with breaking news in real time while giving our readers instant access to the content they want, when and where they want it. Taboola’s predictive technology provides a powerful back-end platform for matching our advertising partners’ messaging goals with the thousands of articles that we publish each week, and promoting the right articles to the right users at the right time, through high-impact placements” said Rich Caccappolo, Chief Operating Officer at DailyMail.com.  “We’re excited to leverage this capability in new ways with marketers going forward.”

“Like many digital publishers, our team has made ‘native’ a priority growth area for our business,” said Rich Sutton, Chief Revenue Officer at Trusted Media Brands, Inc.  “While that journey began by producing custom branded content, Taboola Native enables us to truly scale up this new category by incorporating hundreds of off­site branded content items. We’re very excited about the opportunity to tap into new marketing budgets and forge deeper relationships with our advertising partners.”

“Native advertising is an exciting space for our business, but also one that is rapidly evolving as publishers and advertisers work together on new opportunities,” said Brian Kroski, Chief Digital Officer at American Media, Inc. “Taboola Native offers a powerful and flexible platform for us to experiment with different strategies and unlock the full potential of new native revenue streams.”

“It has been incredibly exciting to see native advertising evolve from early experiments around branded content and ‘custom studios,’ into an entirely new channel that companies like Facebook and Twitter are generating billions of dollars from today,” said Adam Singolda, founder and CEO at Taboola. “We believe there is a major opportunity for the industry to expand the definition of ‘native’ beyond custom content and incorporate branded content that already exists across the web. Digital publishers can compete for content promotion budgets, leveraging their own brand and audience data to recommend off-site branded content to highly-engaged audiences, and for a premium price.”

Taboola’s predictive technology analyzes hundreds of real-time signals (such as location, device type, referral source, social media trends, and more) to match people with the top items they are most likely to be interested in consuming next, generating more than one billion clicks each month.

About Taboola

Taboola is the leading discovery platform, serving over 300 billion recommendations to over 750 million unique visitors every month on some of the Web’s most innovative publisher sites, including USA TODAY, Business Insider, Chicago Tribune, and The Weather Channel. Headquartered in New York City, Taboola also has offices in Los Angeles, London, Tel Aviv, New Delhi, São Paulo, and Bangkok. Publishers, marketers, and agencies leverage Taboola to retain users on their sites, monetize their traffic, and distribute their content to drive high-quality audiences. Learn more at www.taboola.com and follow @taboola on Twitter.

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