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Taboola Acquires ConvertMedia, An Outstream Video Ad Provider, to Fuel Video Recommendations
Taboola, a large content recommendation platform, has acquired ConvertMedia, an outstream video ad provider with $50 million in annual run rate revenue and roots in display advertising. Taboola’s thumbnail recommendations at the end of text articles are found widely on major online publishers’ sites. The company provides 14-15 billion of these recommendations on a daily basis to over 1 billion unique users per month.
CEO and founder Adam Singolda told me the vision behind the acquisition is to begin augmenting current text-based recommendations with ConvertMedia’s videos using Taboola’s underlying data and predictive technology. This will start slowly, with a maximum of one video integrated, to test users’ response. Using ConvertMedia’s outstream format means that videos can begin auto-playing when in view at the bottom of a publisher’s page.
Adam believes Taboola-ConvertMedia could soon serve a billion videos per day, making it one of the biggest video providers outside of Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat.
Adam sees content consumption continuing to move more toward a mobile-first, Facebook-style feed orientation. But with publishers trying to balance accessing Facebook’s massive audience with retaining control over their businesses, Adam sees a big opportunity to incorporate relevant videos that play within the publisher’s page as a way of helping bolster their revenues and retain users.
In addition to integrating at the end of articles, Adam sees ConvertMedia’s video being used to feed Taboola Native placements, which allow publishers to reserve in-article inventory for advertisers.
The ConvertMedia acquisition brings Taboola back to its original roots as a video recommendation platform. Adam believes the company can now provide a full stack of ad tech to publishers including mobile, native and video, better positioning it to help publishers attract TV ad dollars as they’re re-allocated online. Taboola is currently doing almost $500 million in run rate revenues and will have over 500 employees after the ConvertMedia deal closes.Categories: Advertising, Deals & Financings, Technology
Topics: ConvertMedia, Taboola