Taboola, a global leader in powering recommendations for the open web, announced Taboola for Audience, a new AI-powered technology that empowers publishers to drive significantly more traffic, which is more critical now than ever.

Taboola for Audience allows publishers to future-proof their audience development goals and navigate substantial changes affecting their referral traffic from search and social media. In 2024 alone, publishers have contended with changes to search engine and social media traffic, as well as ongoing uncertainty around the impact of Generative AI advancements.

Publishers are making use of Taboola for Audience capabilities and with it, Taboola has driven nearly 10 percent more traffic to select publisher sites. making it a top referral source after social media and search. Among select publishers, Taboola for Audience is the single largest traffic referral source after social media and search as well.

Taboola for Audience is an industry-first offering that empowers publishers with technology to attract and retain readers through advanced personalization and insights, sourced from Taboola’s nearly 600 million daily active users, and massive distribution including across the top mobile device manufacturers in the world.

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Taboola for Audience combines AI-powered personalization capabilities into a single, unified audience development platform, and includes:

• Exclusive acquisition channels such as Android OEM relationships, News aggregators, personalized notifications and more to reach users wherever they may be.
• Reader experience personalization that enables editorial teams to combine editorial voice and AI across their entire site, from article pages to the homepage.
• Actionable audience insights that editorial and commercial teams can learn from, in real-time, to inform content strategies, bringing new loyal audiences to their site.

“Publishers are facing a new era in which sudden decisions by Big Tech and changes in consumer behavior are making it harder to survive,” said Adam Singolda, CEO at Taboola. “Industry giants like Google are changing rules for search, making it harder for publishers to surface content through organic rankings while adding another barrier for site traffic, in the form of Generative AI search. Social platforms like Meta have closed dedicated ‘news’ portals from their apps. Today, publishers need the right technologies to adapt to these changes and to find, grow, and keep audiences. Taboola for Audience gives publishers a single solution, with AI built from years of our successful publisher relationships to thrive in this new era.”

“Delivering more personalized and relevant experiences across all of our sites is critical,” said Mike Braun, Senior Managing VP, Chief Digital Officer at Gray Media. “With Taboola, we have been able to take a truly reader-first approach to personalize our sites, delivering more of what resonates with readers and thereby increasing engagement. Taboola’s audience technologies are allowing us to connect with readers in a more meaningful way.”

“Taboola has been a true strategic partner in helping us grow,” said Christian Broughton, CEO, The Independent. “There’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach to audience engagement, and Taboola’s ability to power key areas of our homepage, recirculation from within articles, and other sections of our site, their huge amounts of readership data that provide actionable insights, and their valued partnership in working side-by-side with our own editorial team are the unique building blocks in our shared success.”