Taboola, a service that powers many of the video recommendation widgets you find across the web, has raised a $9 million Series B funding round. The round is being led by Crescent Point, which is based in New York and Asia, as well as Evergreen VC, which has participated in previous rounds.
This round brings Taboola’s total funding to $15 million (it previously raised a $4.5 million round in November 2008, and a $1.5 million round in November 2007).
Taboola gives publishers a turn-key product for offering recommendations on whatever video platform they’re using (it’s integrated with Brightcove, Ooyala, and other services). This is actually easier said than done — surfacing related videos is hard enough, and then there’s the matter of gauging whether they’re videos people will actually want to watch. That’s Taboola’s speciality, and it’s landed plenty of notable clients, including the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, and Bloomberg.
The service does extensive analytics on the performance of each video, generating a score for each called ‘EngageRank’ (it also tries to tailor the recommendations to each user). And that often leads to more clicks — the company says it drives as much as 2.5 times as much video watching on Bloomberg.
Alongside the funding, the company is announcing a new milestone: the service now generates 250 million recommendations per day across its publisher partner sites.
Taboola’s mission is to arrange the world’s collections of online videos and transform the video discovery experience into a simple and enjoyable one. Taboola is the provider of the world’s first Personalized Video Discovery Platform for publishers, marketers and users. When you visit one of Taboola’s powered-by publishers, you will be able to enjoy a free and easy to use video recommendation solution to discover videos you like. The company’s breakthrough technology seamlessly analyzes professional and user-generated video content, and anonymously...
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