Taboola is a content discovery platform that provides publishers the option to display content recommendations in various ways. The Isaeli-based company that frequently generates those "Promoted Stories" at the end of articles is trying to become more personalized.
On January 5th, 2017, Taboola has acquired Commerce Sciences which provides personalization on site-optimization tools.
With it, its content recommendations should "become much more personalized to increase its engagement rates" in comparison to giants like Facebook or YouTube.
So while Taboola specializes in placing content-recommendation links on websites, and charges publishers and marketers to place their content in those spots. Commerce Sciences helps website owners to automatically tailor their site content for different types of users.
According to Taboola CEO Adam Singolda, the combination of the two technologies could help Taboola's publisher clients to boost traffic and engagement on their sites, which in turn could present Taboola with more ad space and data to monetize.
Commerce Sciences’ technology can display different versions of its site to different users based on their previous behaviors. For example, if a user is unlikely to click on banner ads, the website could instead fill that space with video content or with an invitation to sign up for an email newsletter. This has the potential to increased engagement and a better user experience.
"This is about growing the pie so we can generate more revenue together," said Singolda. "We're saying to publishers that this will help grow your audience. If you grow your audience then we can grow revenue together. If it doesn't work, then why should I charge you? If it does, we both benefit."
This type of website personalization is nothing new. E-commerce companies have used it for years to automatically show users the types of products they're most likely to purchase.
Publishers on the other hand, have been slower to adopt the technology.
This is the company's third acquisition after Perfect Market in 2014 and ConvertMedia in 2016. After the acquisition, employees of Commerce Sciences, founded byAviv Revach, Eyal Brosh and Omri Yacubovich in 2012, will join Taboola's Tel Aviv workforce.
Singolda said that everything has a tradeoff. The reason why the acquisition happened was because for the biggest trend for publishers in the next 2-3 years. Facebook and other competing giants are diluting the relationship between publishers and readers.
Because most news sites "usually change the website once a year, they don't know the value of putting a banner here, an email sign up there. If you compare that to an e-commerce website, it's completely different. They collect data about consumers forever and are optimizing it for a lifetime user."
And for publishers, the acquisition can help smaller startup in getting out of the e-commerce space by applying the technology to two markets: news media and native advertising. These are where personalization is needed.
"I think of Taboola as the Facebook for publishers [in terms of] their capabilities of personalization. They do a great job for themselves, but I want to bring all of that to the open web."
And in order to fight fake news, something that has become a problem for giants like Google and Facebook, Taboola is having policies in place to check for those misleading materials. The company is also having human account managers who verify contents before they are distributed.
If everything goes well, Taboola can help both readers and publishers. Especially during recent moments where publishers are starting to abandon content discovery platforms in reaction to readers sentiments.
As one of the leading content discovery platform, Taboola has raised more than $160 million and surpassed Outbrain which is its one of its closest competitor in the business. And before the acquisition, Commerce Sciences has raised $5.8 million from various investors, including Innovation Endeavors, a venture-capital firm solely backed by Alphabet's Chairman Eric Schmidt.