India Today has signed a 3 year renewal deal with Taboola for content recommendations, ‘full page personalization’, newsroom and audience exchange for driving user engagement, reports Indian Television. The company had earlier partnered with Taboola in January 2014, and will continue its partnership. Other than India Today, Taboola had also signed a 3 year deal with NDTV Convergence in 2015, from which NDTV expected to make between Rs 90-100 crores. Taboola also had deals with HindustanTimes and Rediff. The company competes with Outbrain in India, though there is also AOL owned Gravity. Note that in 2014, India.com switched from Taboola to Outbrain, a partnership that was extended in January this year. Outbrain has other publications like Times Internet, Indian Express, ABP Live, ScoopWhoop and StoryPick as partners. Taboola had raised $117 million from Comcast in February, on annual revenues of $200 million; Techrunch had reported that it had been profitable for the six quarters preceding the fundraising announcement. Interestingly, in October last year, Taboola owned ConvertMedia shuttered its legacy display exchange business, instead shifting focus on video ads to “strike the right balance between good user experience and publisher revenue.”
