Brief:

• Sponsored content platform Taboola signed an exclusive two-year partnership with Business Insider to integrate the Taboola Feed on desktop and mobile devices. The content-recommendation carousel aims to provide Business Insider’s 75 million unique monthly users with seamless, personalized content, per an announcement.​
• Taboola said its feed nudges audiences to remain engaged on a publisher’s site by enabling them to scroll through a stream of articles, video and other experiences. Taboola and Business Insider have worked together for five years.
• Taboola also has partnered with Tribune Publishing, IBM-owned The Weather Company and Le Figaro on integrating the Taboola Feed with their websites.

Insight:

Business Insider is among the digital publishers that are seeking to compete more effectively with social media companies like Facebook by keeping readers engaged in a continual flow of content. The partnership with Taboola to integrate its feed into the Business Insider website may help the Insider-owned provider of business news and analysis to deepen the connection with audiences. The content feed, on its own, is unlikely to be enough to compete against big platforms like Facebook, Apple and others that have set their sites on news to attract users — often cutting into publishers' bottom lines in the process — and is just one of the ways publishers are looking to shore up their role in digital news. A recent off layoffs at digital publisher BuzzFeed points to the challenges in the space, as Business Insider itself reported. 

Taboola has made moves into mobile media, including a partnership last year with Chinese smartphone maker ZTE on a news personalization service for users of Android mobile devices. The partnership marked the first time that ZTE used a personalized news aggregator to drive engagement and revenue. The ZTE feature differed from Apple News by sending readers directly to publishers' websites. USA Today, HuffPost, Business Insider and MSN are among Taboola’s publishing partners.

Taboola is among the companies in the content recommendation industry, which includes Outbrain and RevContent, that claim they can help media companies fend off Facebook, Google and Amazon for digital ad dollars. Taboola in 2016 acquired ConvertMedia, a recommendation engine for online videos, for about $100 million as part of an effort to expand its content offering, TechCrunch reported.