Taboola-X Marks the Spot With Programmatic Ad Units On Your Site

When I sat down with Taboola CEO, Adam Singolda, last Friday in the trendy New York City Jane Hotel for breakfast I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, but I knew it had to be big news.  At a table in the corner of the hotel’s restaurant sat Mr. Singolda, it was his make-shift office for the day as the company is in the process of moving offices.  I sat down, ordered an orange juice and a croissant (it was very good by the way) and Mr. Singolda got right into it.  Right from the get go, you could tell Mr. Singolda was excited about something–after all, before I got there he was meeting with an executive from Twitter.

“We made our first acquisition!” he said, a company called Perfect Market, which provides programmatic ad buying technology.  The two companies have been hard at work integrating their technology together to create Taboola-X, the second big piece of news coming out of the company.  The idea behind Taboola-X is that it will allow the company to create a platform that provides publishers with a “one-stop-shop” for full page monetization across all platforms.

Taboola-X is going to offer a way to tap into a $10 billion performance commerce/services advertising market.  On the demand side, Taboola will soon enable marketers to promote products/services on publisher sites using Taboola-X. Marketers can now address the full purchase-funnel, promote content to drive awareness and consideration of their products, and later, promote products to allow interested users to purchase them.  With Taboola-X publishers can place IAB/customized units beyond the bottom of article (where Taboola’s content discovery technology was previously limited to), such as on the sidebar, or at the top of the page.

The move into the programmatic ad space by Taboola puts them in direct competition with the likes of Google, Yahoo, and others.  And as we saw on Friday, Google appears to be encroaching on Taboola’s space by moving into content discovery as well.  Clearly this space is just heating up and definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Additionally, in other good news for Taboola, the company is expected to have an annualized run-rate post-acquisition that will reach approximately $250 million.