Taboola & The Trade Desk now offer a single interface for native ads, video ads

Content discovery service Taboola took another step this week toward making video ads a regular member of its family, announcing that it is now integrated with The Trade Desk advertising buying platform.

This is the first time that a demand side platform (DSP) partner allows advertisers to place video ads and native ads on Taboola through the same interface.

Taboola offers those “you might also be interested in this” sections at the end of many articles, offering additional content, product info, and recently, related apps. The company says it serves content recommendations to over a billion users monthly.

Taboola CEO and founder Adam Singolda told me that the video ad firm ConvertMedia, purchased last July by Taboola, has now been integrated into his company’s platform. He added that video ads are showing up in about 20 percent of his company’s recommendations, displayed in silent autoplay until the user scrolls over to hear sound.

Video ads are a big part of Singolda’s vision for his company, which includes providing large-scale access to quality, native inventory that is outside Facebook.

Before this new partnership with The Trade Desk, he said, Taboola worked with Criteo and AppNexus for programmatic native ad placement and with ConvertMedia and its partnering DSPs for video ads.

Given advertisers’ growing reluctance to have their ads appear near hate-based and other extremist content, Singolda noted to me that his company rejects “up to 50 percent of advertisers” and keeps its inventory quality high by “rarely working with small publishers.” He added that advertisers can see the specific sites and pages where each of their ads appear.

This growing integration of video could bring Taboola full circle. Singolda has said he started the company in part because he couldn’t find anything to watch on TV, and it seemed to him that TV programs should know enough about his interests to find him.

Now, his company is increasingly becoming about video content finding interested viewers.

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.