Taboola Funded for Video Recommendation Engine

Written by Ryan Lawler

Wednesday, November 19. 2008 at 04:20 PM EST Post a comment

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Fresh on the heels of a new $4.5 million funding round, video recommendation firm Taboola.Com Ltd. is coming to market with a new search and discovery engine that it says will help content owners increase video viewing and engagement times.

Taboola's new funding was led by Evergreen Venture Capital , which also funded the company's initial $1.5 million round of financing in 2007. Evergreen was joined by a few other (unnamed) U.S. and Israeli VCs.

Taboola ViDiscovery product is a video-recommendation engine that takes into account the content and context of the material in a video to better target online video viewers. Taking into account contextual analysis and viewer behavior, Taboola claims to be able to serve up video files that viewers are more likely to watch.

According to Henit Vitos, Taboola's vice president of business development and sales, the company was founded by several former members of the Israeli National Security Agency with the purpose of using their mathematical skills to increase online-video viewership. [Ed. note: And really, is there any more worthwhile goal?]

Apparently they're succeeding, at least with early adopters of the product. Taboola claims that video publishers who have implemented its recommendation engine have seen a 30 percent to 42 percent increase in the percentage of viewers who watched an entire video that was recommended to them, and a 25 percent to 35 percent increase in overall video views.

Vitos says the same recommendation technology can be used to better target video ads to end users, increasing the monetization possibilities of video publishers. 

According to Vitos, the tech-heavy company will use the new funds to ramp up its sales force. Taboola currently has 21 employees, of which Vitos says 90 percent are in the company's technical team.