Taboola, which now serves 3 billion video and article recommendations per day across a wide network of publisher sites, is unveiling "Taboola Choice" this morning. Taboola Choice allows users to proactively filter out unwanted video and article recommendations, so that these will not be seen on any publisher sites which are subsequently visited. By adding this feedback loop, Taboola's recommendations become more precise over time, resulting in a better user experience and more efficiency for both content providers and publishers.

As Adam Singolda, Taboola's CEO and co-founder explained to me recently, with Taboola Choice, an "X" will now appear in the upper right of the thumbnail video or article. When the user clicks on it, a list of reasons is presented to choose from: "Uninteresting," "Misleading," "Offensive," "Repetitive," and "Other." After making the choice, the content is grayed out and won't be shown again. The feedback is also provided in real time to the publisher site through the Taboola analytics dashboard, so editors get further insights into what type of content their audience prefers.

Content recommendations have become a significant part of today's web experience as content providers seek to build audience in targeted, cost-efficient ways and publishers seek to maximize the value of their site's real estate. For video, this is particularly useful as its higher production costs mean that generating an audience is critical to earning an ROI.

As Adam also explained, some content providers are learning that content recommendations can help fuel non-advertising aspects of their businesses, such as subscriptions, product sales, etc. - in other words, using content as a doorway to persuading readers to do something which can be monetized. To the extent that Taboola Choice further streamlines and improves the recommendations served, the ability to generate ROI from content will progressively improve.