NDTV Convergence (NDTV’s digital arm) has signed a five-year deal with Taboola with a “minimum guarantee” of Rs 300 crores for the former. NDTV’s previous Taboola partnership was signed in September 2015 for 3 years and was worth Rs 100 crore, NDTV claims. In its 2015-2018 deal, Taboola had exclusivity over content marketing on NDTV properties. (Read more about the deal here.) Taboola first signed up with NDTV in 2014. It claims that this is its largest deal in the APAC region. Taboola’s other deals In March last year, India Today signed a 3 year renewal deal with Taboola for content recommendations, ‘full page personalization’, newsroom and audience exchange for driving user engagement. In October, Taboola signed a deal with Chinese smartphone manufacturer Vivo wherein Taboola’s Asian publisher network would be integrated into Vivo smartphones “on a personalised basis.” It has partnerships with NDTV, India Today, China Daily, Thai news portal Kapook and OhBulan across Asia. Taboola’s foray into becoming a “news” app Taboola is a content distribution engine which recommends “articles” on news and other websites. Last month, Adam Singolda, the CEO of Taboola told Fast Company, after launching its own news app, “Taboola News is very premium content. It’s not ads. It’s not sponsored content.” He added that the service would display content from “major” news publishers without naming them. Singolda also mentioned that Taboola News has a 50 person editorial team globally which curates “top news content”. Taboola had raised $117 million from Comcast in February 2015,…
