Over the last several years, Taboola has quietly emerged to offer video recommendations on a number of top publisher websites in the U.S. Now it’s setting its sites on international growth and a whole set of new devices that it can make recommendations on. To expand those capabilities, Taboola has raised a $10 million Series C round led by Marker LLC, a New York City-based fund founded by Rick Scanlon and Thomas Pompidou. The round also includes existing investors Evergreen Venture Partners and WGI Group, and brings total funding to $25 million.
Taboola provides a platform that publishers can use to recommend videos on their sites. It frequently appears as a widget that shows a series of three-to-five thumbnails users can click through to watch videos related to whatever they are currently reading or watching. Those videos can come from the publisher’s own site, or can include related content from Taboola’s network of content creators.
By showing related videos from other sources, Taboola allows publishers to provide a greater inventory of video to choose from than just the assets they have on hand. And for video creators, it gives them a new source of distribution and greater monetization opportunities, since ad revenue is shared by the content creator and publisher, with Taboola taking a cut as well.
The startup has signed up a pretty impressive list of publishers using its service, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Hearst, and Gannet, among others. With more than 300 publishers in total using its product, it’s now recommending more than half a billion videos per day, served to more than 130 million users each month.
Taboola, which is headquartered in New York City but has R&D offices in Israel, currently has 40 employees. But it’s looking to double that over the next year, as it plans to expand internationally, and also begin offering recommendations on a whole new set of devices. On the international front, it’s already secured partners in markets such as Germany, England, Israel, Brazil, Mexico, France, and Poland, but is looking to add more.
And while its primary focus has been on the web to date, Taboola is very quickly expanding to provide recommendations on a whole mess of new devices. To do so, it’s built out APIs for iOS and Android devices, as well as for Microsoft’s new Xbox Live interface. Importantly, publishers have all the same analytics and controls that they have for its web product.
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