Baidu Invests In Israeli Content Recommendation Company Taboola

Online content recommendation company Taboola has gained a strategic investment infusion from Chinese search engine company Baidu.com.

The two parties plan to introduce Taboola's content recommendation services into the Chinese market.

Taboola just completed its series E financing of USD117 million in February 2015. The new investment from Baidu further proves the industry's confidence in Taboola and the content discovery market. The exact amount of Baidu's commitment was not readily available, but media are reporting it as a "multimillion dollar deal".

Initially founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, Taboola is currently headquartered in New York. Its content recommendation platform allows publishers to recommend the most attractive videos and articles to users based on their user files and browsing habits to help the publisher websites gain more traffic and advertising income. Since its establishment in 2007, Taboola achieved rapid development.

In 2012, the company's operating revenue was less than USD10 million; however, the number was over USD200 million by 2014. At present, Taboola recommends over 200 billion pieces of content each month to more than 550 million website users in U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Thailand, India, Japan, and Israel. In China, websites such as ChinaMoneyNetwork.com are also already using the services.

Adam Singolda, founder and chief executive officer of Taboola, told local media that they believe content recommendation service has great development potential. They hope to cooperate with Baidu in further developing this service, which will help Chinese netizens change their way of discovering contents. However, Singolda did not mention how or if he will separate potentially illegal content from shoeing in China on Chinese publishers' websites.