Last week Taboola announced that it will partner with Boston.com to use its discovery platform to drive traffic to the the site, expand its reach and grow its revenue. With more than 6.5 million unique monthly users, Boston.com is the leading online news aggregator for the Greater Boston metropolitan area and an influential regional news outlet. Discovery platform Taboola currently serves 360 billion recommendations to more than 1 billion unique visitors each month. Some of its clients include NBC, USA Today, Time Warner Cable, Business Insider, MSN and AOL.

“The digital news space has never been more competitive, and our team is actively seeking out new ways to better engage our readers with the most relevant and timely content,” said Boston.com’s Amy Boisvert in a press release. “Taboola has established itself as the leader in the content discovery space, equipping publishers with a variety of ways to drive audience and revenue goals, and we look forward to working together on generating new strategies that further build our business.”

With the Taboola partnership, Boston.com can better engage readers with personalized recommendations which will be a combination of editorial and promoted content. By increasing engagement on the site and serving sponsored content to its readers, Boston.com can grow advertising and sponsorship revenue.

“Regional news sites have a unique type of audience that is super loyal and engaged, which opens up an opportunity to truly personalize the experience and best serve their communities,” said Taboola CEO and founder Adam Singolda. “We’re very excited to work with the Boston.com team on building out its popular online destination, and leveraging discovery technology to help more people in the Boston area discover great content they may like but never knew existed.”

Taboola basically acts like a search engine in reverse, using its advanced predictive engine to target specific audience segments. It can do so by geographic location, device type, article context, first-party data, B2C third-party data (e.g., income, occupation, lifestyle, marital status), B2B third-party data (e.g., industry, sector, company size, etc.) and shopper intent data across product categories. It can also help drive traffic through retargeting, bringing them through the sales funnel from initial discovery through purchase.

Insider Take:

At first glance, this partnership sounds like a no brainer, but some in the industry view Taboola’s personalized content as spam with links to click bait articles. It may drive traffic to Boston.com, but there is the danger that publishers who are desperate to fight ad blockers and increase revenue will turn to stories disguised as news, like native advertising, to grow readership at any cost. This could, in turn, lead to an increase in the use of ad blockers by consumers who are tired of spam and annoying ads and turn away the very readers it hopes to attract.