Content discovery platform Taboola on Tuesday announced it acquired ConvertMedia, a provider of native in-feed video advertising. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company said ConvertMedia has annual revenues of $50 million. ConvertMedia’s 60 employees will join Taboola which brings its headcount to nearly 500.
Taboola will integrate ConverMedia’s technology with its data and personalization engine. The combined company will be able to deliver more than a billion video streams per day, according to Adam Singolda, Taboola Founder and CEO. The goal is to help publishers deliver relevant and viewable experiences to the right consumers at the right time, in addition to helping them monetize their video inventory.
The acquisition helps Taboola round out its video offerings and offer customization options for publishers to control delivery and related price points.
Explaining the acquisition, Singolda said: “Up until now, Taboola worked with media companies around the world to send audiences to their own Webpages. Now, we’re allowing marketers to syndicate videos into the feed. So instead of sending people away, they’ll see the video in the feed. We’re allowing markers to send videos to all our publisher sites.” It’s another way of working with publishers to monetize their video inventory by using branded video.
Taboola has big ambitions: to become one of the top five video companies. “I believe that TV dollars will look for premium [video] supply on the Web. Because of our existing scale, we have a chance to become one of the top five video companies,” said Singolda. There are just a handful of players in that rarified space, which Singolda considers any company delivering more than a billion views a day:Snapchat, YouTube, and Facebook.
“We’re serving already 14 billion recommendations a day. We can find publishers and marketers video scale in the open Web—not in walled gardens” Singolda said, taking a jab at Facebook and others.