AppNexus and Taboola have connected with each other to enable buyers to purchase Taboola’s native placements programmatically. Eighty-five AppNexus buyers have already used this connection to buy on Taboola.
The integration represents a step forward for programmatic native just as another huge native pool of supply disappeared: FBX, which will shut down in November.
Taboola CEO Adam Singolda predicted this partnership may redirect at least some of the advertiser spend lost when FBX finally shuts down. “That money has to go somewhere,” he said.
The deal adds yet another entry point to Taboola’s publisher pool. It comes just months after Taboola added another outside programmatic partner, Criteo. Its retargeting ads now appear within Taboola modules.
“We wanted to give programmatic buyers an opportunity to compete with our own advertising demand and drive more competition,” Singolda added. “We have 5 million pieces of sponsored content that we sold directly into our system. But compared to the Facebooks of the world, there is a lot of room to keep growing.”
AppNexus buyers can use the same type of unstructured, native bid requests that they would use on native platforms like FBX in order to buy on Taboola. Plus, they can make sure they buy the inventory while keeping global frequency caps in mind, for example, and have all the data in one place. They will bid on a CPM basis. That’s a bit of a shift given that most advertisers buying directly into Taboola bid on a CPC basis.
Native formats are especially important as consumers spend more time on mobile devices. Singolda expects native and video formats to dominate in mobile environments. Taboola is focusing on the native opportunity for now. More than half its revenue is mobile today, Singolda said.
It also provides buyer an alternative native option to walled garden search of social environments. “Through open partnerships like AppNexus and Taboola, programmatic buyers have more choice in purchasing native inventory beyond just search and social,” noted Andrew Eifler, AppNexus VP of product.
For publishers, the deal offers a new source of revenue. They will have full control over what types of ads appear in their widgets, the same way they do today. To start, Taboola will also manually evaluate deals as they come through to ensure quality.
There may be more deals like this on the horizon. “Our hope is to find scale with a few strategic partners, AppNexus being one of them,” Singolda said.
