Taboola Doubles Down on Personalization Through Acquisition of Commerce Sciences

Taboola, the leading global content discovery platform, announced today the acquisition of Commerce Sciences, a pioneer in web personalization and on-site optimization.

NEW YORK — This acquisition furthers Taboola’s personalization strategy, as publishers need to be increasingly strategic about what content and experiences they deliver to each consumer. People exhibit an array of behaviors and interests on the web, depending on situational factors such as time of day, device type, location, referral source and more. Rather than grouping people based solely on demographics, Commerce Sciences’ personalization technology is able to analyze the implied characteristics of each visitor, given the particular time and context, meaning that the same person may be more inclined to interact with different on-site experiences throughout the day. Both Taboola and Commerce Sciences have developed powerful personalization products and combining these will provide a best in class personalization offering for publishers.

“These are important times to understand the value of data and the user experience, as the web has become very fragmented. The notion of personalization based on user demographics is old school. It’s evolving into the context in which users are consuming the web; we all have multiple personas as we come from social, search, our phone, and more – imagine if every site had a version tailored to each one of those personas,” explained Adam Singolda, CEO and Founder of Taboola. “I’m very excited to work with Aviv, Eyal and the talented Commerce Sciences team who spent five years focused on this very complex challenge of personalization. Together, I believe we have a clear path to unlocking the potential of a ‘web of one’, tailored to each and every one of us based on the context in which we consume content.”

“We founded Commerce Sciences with the vision of revolutionizing the online experience by enabling websites to engage with each visitor in a truly personalized manner, resulting in a drastic improvement of the on-site experience and greater monetization,” said Aviv Revach, Founder & CEO of Commerce Sciences. “There is a natural synergy with Taboola, where we look forward to offering publishers 1-to-1 experiences at tremendous scale.”

“Having led technological development in web optimization for years, there is a significant opportunity to leverage Taboola’s massive data sets for laser-focused personalization. This can be a true game-changer for publishers,” added Eyal Brosh, Founder & CTO.

The deal was closed on 01/01/2017. Commerce Sciences employees will join Taboola’s Tel Aviv offices.

Commerce Sciences was founded in 2012 by ex-Israeli Intelligence alumni Aviv Revach and Eyal Brosh as well as a third co-founder, Omri Yacubovich. It is backed by Genesis Partners, Innovation Endeavors, KGC Capital, and additional value-add investors.

About Taboola

Taboola is the leading discovery platform, serving over 360 billion editorial and video recommendations to over 1 billion unique visitors every month on some of the Web’s most innovative publisher sites, including USA TODAY, Huffington Post, MSN, Business Insider, Chicago Tribune and The Weather Channel. Headquartered in New York City, Taboola also has offices in Los Angeles, London, Tel Aviv, New Delhi, Bangkok, São Paulo, Beijing, Shanghai and Tokyo. Publishers, marketers, and agencies leverage Taboola to retain users on their sites, monetize their traffic, and distribute their content to drive high-quality audiences. Learn more at www.taboola.com and follow @taboola on Twitter.