Taboola Update Makes Content Discovery Harder for Publishers, But May Get Them More Qualified Traffic

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how paid discovery through recommendation engines can be a powerful alternative to PPC for subscription content sites.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how paid discovery through recommendation engines can be a powerful alternative to PPC for subscription content sites. I also mentioned the major players in this space: Taboola, Outbrain and nRelate and compared their services in our in-depth, Members-Only How-To on Subscription Site Insider.Of the three vendors, Taboola had the smallest number of publishers hosting their recommendations on their sites (5,000 publishers versus 70,000 for Outbrain and 85,000 for nRelate), but all of Taboola’s publishers were major sites with more than 2 million page views each month.Because Taboola works with the big traffic drivers, their recent update is interesting (and may be copied by Outbrain and nRelate in the near future). This past week, Taboola introduced a new feature that allows readers to tweak what content gets recommended to them, and clarify why they may not want to see some content. A screenshot of the feature is below.

As a reader, I love this feature. I am SO tired of having stories about Miley Cyrus “twerking” pop up when I’m trying to read about Syria or, admittedly, Will and Kate’s new baby. And I can’t wait to mark all the “click-bait” stories with photos of half naked women as offensive. (Although, irony of ironies, The Huffington Post uses Taboola, and at the end of their story about Yahoo’s new logo, recommended a story on Miley Cyrus twerking, but didn’t offer Taboola’s new feature of opting out of seeing that image or marking it as offensive. What gives, Taboola? If a reader can’t use this feature to tweak HuffPo’s rampant use of misogynistic marketing, what’s the point?)However, this will make the discovery game harder for some publishers. One, publishers will no longer be allowed to target everyone — readers will have a say. Two, because readers can mark stories as “misleading,” financial and health publications, which have already gotten some pushback from paid discovery platforms, may get blacklisted by readers.At the same time, the more you know about your readers (and the more they opt-in to reading your content), the more qualified traffic and leads you’ll get as a publisher. Therefore, publications that thrive on quality content should look forward to this new update from Taboola.