Beginning in September, Yahoo Japan will use Taboola’s video discovery and content distribution network to power recommendations on owned and operated properties, as well as partner publisher sites, with the rollout of Yahoo Content Discovery.
Yahoo Japan is a joint venture of Yahoo and SoftBank. In addition to its role as an online search and Internet portal, Yahoo Japan runs online auction and ecommerce site Yahoo Shopping, which is now powering payment transactions with Alibaba’s Alipay service.
Yahoo (the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based one) owns about 30% of Yahoo Japan (some reports have pinned the value of that stake at $9 billion), in addition to its oft-discussed position in Alibaba Group, worth an estimated $26 billion.
In addition to global publisher access and the additional traction some 8.5 billion page views Yahoo News incurs each month, Adam Singolda, Taboola’s founder and CEO, said Yahoo Japan’s display advertiser relationships will be an additional base that Taboola can tap on the buy side.
“Yahoo Japan will build the marketplace, launch this and allow advertisers to submit budgets for content, and we will build the products and services and help them with best practices and (stay) high-touch to help support them,” Singolda said.
Taboola’s platform dishes up 130 billion content recommendations each month using advanced algorithms that predict what kind of content a user is most likely to consume next; it is used by publishers ranging from Time to USA Today to help monetize traffic. Now, with access to the Yahoo Japan publisher network, the platform could further expand its reach.
Although Taboola today focuses on video, articles and slideshows, the company is looking to add more products to its pipeline for both advertisers and publishers. A relationship with Yahoo Japan, he said, is about content, but also commerce and search tie-ins. “I think we’ll continue to add more products around monetization and engagement, and all of that is under one hood, which is creating the Web of ‘one,’” Singolda added.
“We want to build a company to be here 30 years,” he said. “We’re going toward a new type of advertising that is driven by information, content and native experiences. We’re growing very fast, we’re profitable and this is an opportunity to really become a global network.”
