Google is for search, FB is for social, Taboola is for publishers: Adam Singolda

Taboola enables over 1.4B people to discover what’s interesting and new at the moments they’re most ready to explore. Powered by Deep Learning, AI, and a large dataset, Taboola’s discovery platform creates new monetisation, audience and engagement opportunities for digital properties, including publishers, mobile carriers and handset manufacturers. Advertisers use Taboola to reach their target audience when they’re most receptive to new messages, products and services.

Also read:  Google sets eyes on Indian startup ShareChat

Taboola has opened their fourth global support centre in India and are tripling their workforce in India with tremendous speed. The reach and effectiveness of the Taboola platform have also driven top India brands to partner with Taboola at a time when many are actively seeking new platforms for generating awareness, leads, and purchases of their products and services. Besides this, Taboola Newsroom now offers publishers Propensity to Subscribe, a feature that uses machine learning to identify which users are more likely to subscribe and allows publishers to target engaged registered users with articles that promote the most subscriptions.

In conversation with Adgully, Adam Singolda, Founder and CEO, Taboola, speaks about the company’s strategy for India, impact of the pandemic, key learnings and more.

Taboola has been in India for the last few years. What has been the vision for India and going forward what is your strategy for the Indian market as online consumption is on the rise, especially after the pandemic?

Taboola has been in India for the last few years and we have a large team of nearly 100 people that allow us to support it all. We are also proud to have 78% mobile reach in the territory. Some great publishers include NDTV, India Today, Indian Express, Zee Media, The Hindu, ABP News, India TV, Sakshi, Andhra Jyothy, Manorama, and Dinamalar. Our RPMs were up 40% quarter-over-quarter, despite the pandemic. On the advertiser side, we work with the biggest names in consumer electronics, CPG, travel, insurance, and automotive.

Our long-term vision for India correlates with our overall mission – to be the “open web/ gateway to publishers”. We will continue to support our publishing partners and advertisers and provide more tools, such as our recently launched Taboola Trends, provide regional data insights and more, so our partners can continue to grow their audience, increase engagement and drive traffic at scale. We are helping people discover things they may like Google – search, FB – social and Taboola – open web/publishers. We are 1,400 people globally, reach 1.4 billion people each month, drive $1 billion in revenue and have been profitable since 2014. 

Taboola is mainly English and international, while India is a multilingual state with diverse culture and language. What is your strategy to address the large language population who today are actively engaged online?
Taboola has offices in 18 countries around the world and works with both publishers and advertisers in many languages. In India, we have partners using English, Marathi, Tamil, Hindi, Telugu and more and continue to welcome publishers and advertisers in other languages. 

The pandemic and COVID-19 have brought in some behavioural shift among the customers, have you noticed the same on your platform? What kind of pattern is emerging and how do you plan to address the new normal?

During this COVID-19 pandemic, India along with many other countries were under lockdown and there was a significant shift in peoples’ reading patterns. The Taboola network saw a surge in traffic around subjects related to automotive, home loans, security of video conferencing applications, and remote learning for students at home. People have clicked more on ads, from March to April, in many categories such as Entertainment (13%), Finance (7%), Home (5%), and Travel (34%). This revealed the shifts in how readers were consuming content during the lockdown, which also impacted various brand strategies and how advertisers were planning their future budget spend during and post pandemic.

This year put every company’s culture to the test, and we saw 2 types of approaches emerge. Some companies hoped the pandemic would end quickly and some embraced it and changed. We saw a decrease in advertising rates in March, but reacted quickly. We launched trends.taboola.com, which is an insights hub for our data. We moved HR managers into ad-sales roles and doubled down on AI.

Our people played a big part in our success as well. We’ve been working from home since March 15 and have learned to over-communicate, whether it’s having an ‘all hands’ company meeting every week with 1,400 people, promoting ‘unzoom events’ that encouraged people to have experiences that are not on calls. We invested into client relationships and had great empathy for the adjustments of family life happening while we worked from home. Because of these changes, we will be stronger this year than ever before. 

What kind of categories are leveraging your platform? Please share some statistics and trends that are emerging.

Several interesting revelations have emerged during the pandemic period in India. There have been large readership increases in terms and categories like Food Delivery (70%), education (70%), health (65%) and finance (35%). Recently, readership about the price of gold is up by 13% and the topic of record rainfall (76%) as well. These kinds of insights can help advertisers build campaigns related to climate change or allow publishers to focus on these stories to increase readership.

This data is important because you can see differences by country as well. For example, in the US, topics that we have seen increase which we have not seen as strong in India include Home Improvement (140%) Pet Products (50%), gaming (145%), and National parks is up 15%.

Festivals and IPL are happening almost simultaneously. This is the best time for brands to leverage both online and offline activities. Will Taboola be witnessing a hike in the audience engagement for the next three months?

We do expect to see an uptick in audience interest in many topics. Diwali is coming up and we have seen a spike in traffic over the last month. Diwali-related topics saw a 70% increase in page view traffic. IPL related topics have seen an over 200% increase in the past 30 days, with 32M pageviews around these stories. Mental health concerns continue as the pandemic continues to affect daily life - mental health-related topics saw 6.1M pageviews and a 76% increase in the past 30 days. 

What will be Taboola’s focus going forward?

As mentioned earlier, our mission was and will be over the next 100 years to be the “open web/gateway to publishers” company. Google is for search, FB is for social, Taboola is for publishers.

Over the next decade, we are going to focus on the concept of “time” – to ensure we can engage consumers with our publishers a lot more. We’ll focus on AI to better our recommendations across publishers’ entire sites and make sure we have a ‘news everywhere’ approach, bringing our publishers content to every device out there, similar to Apple News but in the rest of the world. We will continue to integrate our publishers into the smartphones and consumer electronics leaders of the world. We will also focus on ways to 10x our ability to help publishers drive revenue, including evolving our performance advertising offerings and will give brands/ agencies more freedom with the formats they can use. 

Finally, from a culture standpoint, we want to be the best company for diverse communities to want to work for and succeed. By doing this, we will continue to build our team and focus on delivering client relationships that are win/win for both publishers and advertisers.

Any thoughts on the recent Outbrain merger news?

I shared a detailed blog post about why we did not continue to pursue the transaction with Outbrain. We met some great people during the process of our acquisition of Outbrain and earned true friendships. Our initial deal to acquire Outbrain was supposed to last 12 months, expiring in October 2020. If the deal was not finalised by then, both of us had the ability to walk away. We exchanged financial performance as part of the process and had the ability to pay $250M and 30%, but, based on financials, our shareholders thought it would be too hard to justify the same deal based on the relative contribution of the two companies.