USAToday.com Implements Taboola's Video Recommendations

USAToday.com has begun implementing video recommendations engine Taboola to power videos on all of its News pages. I confirmed with Taboola's CEO and founder Adam Singolda that USAToday.com is using the company's "Text2Video" product on its news pages currently and that a fuller rollout is planned, though he wouldn't provide further details.

With the Text2Video product, Taboola analyzes web pages and uses its proprietary text algorithms to understand the content of those pages. This data is combined with cookies to gain insight into users' interests. Videos are then recommended based on this information using Taboola's EngageRank video solution.

This is the 3rd big recent publisher win for Taboola, following both NYTimes.com and Bloomberg (additional customers include Demand Media, Revision3, Kiplingers and others). What's distinctive about the USAToday.com implementation is that the video recommendations are given the most prominent placement yet (see below), at the top of the right column with 3 thumbnails exposed. That's highly valuable page real estate, and it shows the confidence the USA Today team must have not only in the quality/relevance of the recommended videos, but also in their ability to deliver superior monetization.



Adam told me recently that the improvement in click-throughs that Taboola drives is typically 250% of other solutions. So more video views means more ad inventory to sell. In the USAToday deal it appears Taboola keeps every 3rd thumbnail or so as an ad. With the amount of video proliferating I continue to see a huge demand by content providers to improve discovery and monetization.

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Note: Taboola is a VideoNuze sponsor.

Categories: Newspapers, Technology

Topics: Taboola, USAToday.com