Taboola adds Commerce Sciences as part of its evolution ‘from widget to platform’

Taboola content recommendations at the bottom of a publisher’s web page

Content recommendation service Taboola has announced that it has purchased site personalization and optimization platform Commerce Sciences and will make its capabilities available for free to Taboola’s customers.

Backers of the optimization service, which was launched in 2012 by ex-Israeli Intelligence alumni, include Alphabet/Google Chairman CEO Eric Schmidt’s Innovation, Endeavors. Commerce Sciences will discontinue its current freestanding offering, and its employees, based in Tel Aviv, will move to Taboola’s offices in that city. Deal terms were not made public.

Taboola founder/CEO Adam Singolda told me that this acquisition in the third step in the evolution of his company from “a widget to a platform,” so that it can offer site improvement tools to publishers in the “open web” — that is, outside of the giants, Google and Facebook.

The previous two steps, he said, were the inclusion in the Taboola dashboard of a Newsroom editorial service that supports A/B testing of headlines and thumbnail images, and native ad server Taboola Native.

[Read the full article on Marketing Land.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.