Taboola Signs 3-Year Exclusive Renewal Agreement with India Today, Expanding Partnership To Full Platform Integration

India’s Most Diversified Media Group Taps Taboola To Drive Engagement, Revenue and Audience Development

NEW YORK & NEW DELHI–Taboola, the world’s leading discovery platform, today announced an exclusive, 3-year renewal agreement with India Today. Under the agreement, India Today will be integrating Taboola’s personalized content recommendations, Full Page Personalization, Newsroom and Audience Exchange with the goal of driving user engagement, audience development and revenue.

India Today Group is India’s leading and most diversified media conglomerate with magazines, newspapers, books, radio, television, print and internet. India Today first partnered with Taboola in January 2014 with the initial goal of introducing high quality native advertising to consumers, whereby in the new agreement Taboola will work hand in hand with India Today to integrate its full Discovery platform across desktop and mobile devices.

The partnership will leverage Taboola’s suite of platform capabilities. In addition to continuing to serve sponsored content recommendations, India Today will launch Taboola’s Personalization in an effort to increase onsite user engagement. India Today’s properties will also utilize Taboola’s “audience exchange” architecture, which empowers publisher teams to strategically manage and optimize the flow of traffic across the India Today network, driving users to relevant off-site content and high-value video pages.

“We want to double down on serving content that is tailored to users interests and behaviors, so our readers remain engaged and excited about what they are reading,” said Kalli Purie, Group Editorial Director (Broadcast & New Media), India Today Group. “Taboola has already helped us achieve success, we look forward to working towards our goal of driving increased user engagement and audience development.”

“India continues to be one of our fastest growing markets with content consumption and mobile growth on a steady rise. We are humbled to be working with the India Today team in years to come on integrating Taboola’s Discovery platform, and go ‘beyond the widget’ to find meaningful growth around engagement, audience and revenue,” said Adam Singolda, founder and CEO of Taboola. “Especially in light of massive mobile growth in the Indian market, we’re even more excited to work together on connecting people with content they may like and never knew existed.”

Taboola acts as a search engine in reverse. Instead of expecting people to search for information, Taboola helps information find people at the right time in the form of recommended content. Its predictive engine analyzes hundreds of real-time signals (including location, device type, referral source, social media trends and more) to match users with content they are most likely to be interested in consuming next.

Media consumption in India is on a steady rise and the country has remained a key priority for Taboola, which has established partnerships with several Indian publishers including Times of India, NDTV, Jagran, Bhaskar, Aajtak, Amarujala, Rediff and Deccan Chronicle. The announcement of India Today follows several recent wins by Taboola with leading publishers globally including Entrepreneur.com, El Universal, and Blasting News.

About Taboola

Taboola is the leading discovery platform, serving over 360 billion editorial and video recommendations to over 1 billion unique visitors every month on some of the Web’s most innovative publisher sites, including USA TODAY, Huffington Post, MSN, 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, Bangkok, São Paulo, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Istanbul, and Tokyo. 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.

About India Today Group Digital

India Today Group Digital is the digital division that handles all the Online and Mobile Marketing activities of the India Today Group brands. ITGD’s multimedia operations extend from our flagship magazines India Today & Business Today, to the leading television news channels Aaj Tak & India Today Television including the Indian editions of international power brands like Cosmopolitan, Harper Bazaar and many more. ITGD has also created a first of its kind comprehensive women’s portal oddnaari.in which celebrates women who break convention, cannot be straitjacketed, and want to read a wide variety of stories.

The objective of the Group is to make successful offline properties relevant in the digital era, ensuring that the premium multimedia content of the India Today Group is available in all digital formats and across devices viz iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows, etc.

India Today Group websites include indiatoday.in, aajtak.in, businesstoday.in, oddnaari.in, cosmopolitan.in, iChowk.in, DailyO.in, theLallantop.com, mailtoday.in, and many others. India Today Group has been instrumental in pulling in millions of online audiences. The Group also has a vast presence on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+.