The world’s largest content discovery platform Taboola announced on Thursday that they had conquered the #1 spot on comScore’s distributed content network report for desktop, with content reaching 639.5 million users around the world.
As a part of their release celebrating the announcement, Taboola revealed to the public that they had passed the 1.15 billion click threshold during the month of October.
“October’s comScore data is a huge milestone for us given the company-wide emphasis we put on international markets, bringing personalization to people everywhere around the world. We now operate in countries such as Japan, China, Korea, Germany, UK, France, Brazil, and many others,” said Adam Singolda, founder and CEO of Taboola.
Founded in 2006, Israeli Taboola’s content marketing platform gives publishers greater monetization capabilities with suggested links to both internal and external links, driving increased traffic and revenues. The New York City-based company claims to serve 750 million unique visitors with 300 billion content recommendations every month.
Offering alternatives in a tough market
It’s no secret at this point that the advertising business has been struggling across the board over the past few years. Challenges like ad blockers and general ambivalence from consumers are pushing down revenues not only for advertisers but for publishers as well.
This is all bad news for a basically free Internet that was built on the ad supported model, and as hard as it is, it should raise some public concern over the future of quality content.
Platforms like Taboola offer publishers a viable alternative to the banner ads that used to put food on their tables but are now not even registering as impressions. Suggested content algorithms work to pull up a mix of articles that could actually interest the reader, introducing them to new websites. Scattered in the mix are also supported stories – some of which is branded content marketing while others are just looking for traffic – that can provide publishers with a much needed revenue stream.
While Taboola is leading the pack in this field and doing well, the fight to survive and flourish is far from over. The entry of big name actors like Google, Yahoo, and even AOL to the content discovery game has complicated matters even more for the companies like Taboola and Outbrain who have managed to build up and dominate the business up to this point. A fight over market share is not something they are looking forward to as ad dollars become harder to come by.
Further complicating matters for Taboola are forces outside of their control. The company’s valuation was recently unfairly downgraded by Fidelity, likely far below their realistic value for the statistics that they have been posting. Fidelity, and they are hardly alone, has looked at the overall state of how publicly traded adtech companies are faring – poorly – and painted private agents like Taboola with the same broad brush.
The content discovery industry is not without its faults. While the idea of showing visitors content that they want to click on and helping publishers keep the lights on is a good thing, nobody out there so far seems to be doing it very well. This sector is still developing and is yet to reach the optimal balance between what the readers want and what the publishers need.
Taboola is one of the few players in the industry that experts say is actually turning an impressive profit. Publishers and content marketers are reporting positive feedback regarding new traffic and conversions, beating out most other options available to them currently. They will likely remain on top for the foreseeable future while putting egg on the faces of some analysts at the big investing houses.