Taboola and Yahoo! Japan Partner to Push Content Marketing Into the Mainstream

Jeff Weisbein -

If you had any questions about whether or not content discovery and content marketing were here to stay, today’s news of Taboola and Yahoo! Japan partnering to launch a new Yahoo service called Yahoo! Content Discovery answers that.  And the answer is a resounding, yes, it’s here to stay.  Starting in September, visitors of Yahoo! News (on Yahoo! Japan) and its partner sites will start seeing the new discovery service in action.

“We are extremely happy to have built an alliance with a wonderful company like Taboola,” said Hiroshi Kataoka, vice president of Yahoo! News. “By providing this service to our publishers with Taboola’s help, we will unite hundreds of our participating publisher partners, and allow users to discover interesting content between multiple websites.”

I spoke with Taboola founder and CEO, Adam Singolda, on Monday to learn more about this strategic partnership.  Needless to say he is very excited.  He had just returned from Japan where he presented to a packed room of publishers and Yahoo! Japan partners about the benefits of Taboola and how this partnership will help them provide a better user experience and bring in more revenue.

The latest stats for Yahoo! News (in Japan) are pretty incredible.  The company says the service has more than 8.5 billion page views per month. Currently, Taboola’s platform currently serves over 130 billion content recommendations every month to over 350 million people, this partnership will clearly inflate those numbers quite a bit.

In order to make good content recommendations, Taboola has developed algorithms that examine context, browsing history, collaborative filtering (similar to Amazon product recommendations), geography, and social media trends to predict what content a specific user may want to consume next.

“We’re extremely excited to share our vision with Yahoo! News of connecting people around the world with content they may like but never knew existed,” said Adam Singolda, founder and CEO of Taboola. “We believe that ‘Discovery’ has become a new global advertising category and we’re thrilled by the media giant’s great confidence in our technology and humbled by the opportunity to have Taboola’s technology and products soon available to the Japanese market.”