Taboola automates personalized homepages

The new Homepage For You offering announced by native advertising and discovery platform Taboola will use AI to automate the curation of relevant and personalized content on websites’ homepages. The automated surfacing of content likely to engage readers will complement editors’ existing ability to curate homepage experiences.

Among publishers already using the solution are McClatchy and The Independent. Beta testing showed a 30-50% increase in CTR with use of the tool. The dataset on which recommendations are based includes some 500 million daily active users.

Why we care. Adam Singolda, CEO and founder, said in a release: “If you open up a social media app, you are greeted with content you really want to see. For publishers, the most loyal readers are those who visit a homepage directly and look for editors to tell them what’s important for them to know.”

This is a telling argument. Social media channels like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube present personalized, curated experience the moment they are opened based on the user’s previous behavior. A solution like Taboola’s should take publishers in the direction of being able to compete — although many publishers will still want to strike a balance between editorial content and native advertising.

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.