News Corp picks Taboola over Outbrain for native programmatic rollout
News Corp has teamed up with content discovery network Taboola in its latest programmatic venture, which will see the Israeli-owned company provide the underlying technology for News Native Networks.
Launched as ‘News Native Network powered by Taboola’, the service will provide native content, distribution and advertiser booking services along with referral generation and conversion.
News Corp’s Neil Robinson and Julian Delany with Taboola CTO, Lior Golan
The deal sees News move from rival network Outbrain following a competitive tender, News Digital Networks Australia managing director Julian Delany told Mumbrella: “We did a very big RFP on this, this is a big part of our business, but we knew we wanted to take our native content product further so did a pretty big tender process.
“We ended up choosing Taboola because the product set they could give us, both now and as we look forward, was in a better spot. The infrastructure they could put around our business we thought was in a better position.”
“It was a tough decision because a lot of these companies do this quite well, but it’s their ability to be able to intertwine into our infrastructure that made the difference. They were also willing to invest in a few new things for us to make it all work.”
The partnership will see News Corp Australia implement the Taboola Feed across its digital network including news.com.au, News’ metro mastheads and lifestyle sites including kidspot.com.au, taste.com.au and vogue.com.au.
For advertisers, News Corp is offering Taboola’s services through their News Corp Australia representative along with trading programmatic content. Taboola customers will also be able to buy content recommendations on across News’ network.
Delaney said the deal adds to News’ existing native content offerings: “We’ll still be doing our branded content capabilities. We’ve had the News Native Network for some time, that will continue.
“The content discovery is a new capability where we’re going to be able to build audiences for their own content off-network and they can use DNA to get some more valuable premium audiences from us across their owned and operated channels. That will be traded to similar to what we’ve got now.
“I think the bigger change is the programmatic content discovery. This is going to enable audiences to customers’ owned content that they can also buy through programmatic channels and they can do that through News Corp representation.
“That’s opening up content discovery buying to agency trading desks which we haven’t done previously and that gives them new premium content opportunities across our network.”
On the publisher side, Delany described how the data aspects of the deal, which will be rolling out over coming months, will enable editorial teams to better understand reader behaviour.
“This is to help the editorial teams more on the subscription side of the business. Hopefully it will give us more insight into what’s working with our subscribers. We have a couple of tools that already help us internally what we’re hoping to do is plug some of the insights Taboola can get and put them into our internal products.”
Adam Singolda, Taboola’s CEO and founder, added in a statement: “We are committed to supporting quality journalism, and Australia is a critical market for our business. We are honoured that News Corp Australia has chosen Taboola as a key discovery partner empowering users to discover things they may like and never knew existed during those ‘moments of next,’ when they are most open to discovering content they may like.”
News Corp Australia’s managing director of digital solutions, Neil Robinson concluded: “There is increasing demand from our clients and partners to get their content in front of quality audiences in brand safe and trusted environments.
“Our native marketplace will allow us to deliver just that and become a very important part of our content and performance marketing ecosystem. With complete flexibility and servicing in terms of buying and trading digital content, a client can come in for one part of our offering or connect them all together. It’s incredibly exciting as there is no offer like this in market.”
Where is the tie Robbo?
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Must have offered a load of cash. How much?
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Fair point CG…bold shirt as well
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