Taboola

History

Taboola was founded in 2006 by Adam Singolda in Tel Aviv, Israel. Taboola provides readers with options to content and topics they may not have thought to search for. In November 2007, Taboola raised $1.5 million from Evergreen Venture Partners in the Series A round. In November 2008, Evergreen Venture Partners invested an additional $4.5 million.

In August 2010, Taboola expanded their offering to include video-to-video and text-to-video recommendations. They were reported to have increased Revision3's video views by approximately 90%.

In August 2011, Taboola raised a $9 million Series B round from Marker and Evergreen Venture Partners. This was followed by a $10 million Series C from Marker in June 2012, and a $15 million Series D in February 2013 from Pitango Venture Capital, along with existing investors Evergreen Venture Partners, WGI Group, and Marker.

In January 2013, Taboola began doing article recommendations. In September 2013, launched Taboola Choice, a feature where users could filter out content recommendations they didn't want to see.

In December 2013, Taboola launched an API to bring its content recommendations to native mobile apps.

In August 2014, Taboola acquired Perfect Market, a company that powers programmatic advertising on publishers' websites. Taboola also announced the launch of Taboola-X, a tool to help publishers monetize their site. Taboola reported that it was serving 150 billion recommendations to 400 million unique users every month with an estimated $250 million run rate.

In February 2015, Taboola raised Series E of $117 million in a round led by Fidelity Investments along with existing investors Marker and Steadfast Capital, as well as strategic investors Comcast Ventures, Groupe Arnault, Yahoo Japan, Advance Publications (parent company of magazine publisher Condé Nast), and Carlo De Benedetti, chairman of Italian Media conglomerate Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso.

In May 2015, Taboola announced an undisclosed round of "multi-millions" in funding from Baidu.

In May 2016, Taboola announced they had reach over 1 billion unique users worldwide, including 250 million that were reached on mobile.

In July 2016, Taboola acquired ConvertMedia, a recommendation engine designed specifically to sniff out and recommend online videos at scale. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

Reception

Taboola is one of the first companies in the adtech space to run native advertising, although the content recommendation space has enlarged to include new competitors.

Taboola and Outbrain have both been described by Internet commentators as alternatives to Google AdSense that content publishers can opt to consider for revenue streams.

In January 2013, Jack Marshall wrote that Taboola recommendations on websites such as Time, Bloomberg.com, and Politico often took users to websites such as Newsmax, which attempted to upsell users to low-quality e-books on topics such as how to avoid financial ruin. A similar criticism was made on Priceonomics in April 2014.

In May 2014, Taboola complied with the Better Business Bureau's request that they make their "sponsored content" disclosures more prominent.