PRESS RELEASE

AOL Announces Strategic Partnership With Taboola

Expands sponsored-content recommendations to AOL’s media properties in the US, UK and Canada

Companies to explore opportunities for collaboration on new data initiatives and mobile-centric content experiences

NEW YORK, NY — January 20, 2016 – AOL today announced a strategic partnership with Taboola with the goal of delivering better content and advertising experiences for AOL’s more than 500 million and Taboola’s more than 750 million global users*.Taboola’s leading discovery platform will be integrated across all premium brands under the AOL umbrella including AOL.com, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, AutoBlog, AOL Mail and MapQuest in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. This will enable major brands and content marketers to reach consumers across AOL properties through high-impact sponsored content recommendations. The partnership includes desktop, tablet, mobile web, and mobile apps.

AOL and Taboola plan to advance the partnership through new data initiatives, which will offer greater insight into user-intent, as well as collaborate on mobile-first content experiences that leverage the publisher network of AOL and Taboola. Additionally, AOL expects to take an equity stake in Taboola, evidencing the desire of the parties for close collaboration on this long-term strategy.

“Beyond the traditional native advertising business, this is a strategic partnership with a big and long term vision to solve together some of the publisher issues around off-network consumption of content,” said Jimmy Maymann, EVP and President, AOL Content and Consumer Brands at AOL. “To fully be able to collaborate on that for the long term, we have the opportunity to take a stake in Taboola, which we’re excited about.”

“We’re entering a new era where social platforms are growing to become very powerful, asking users to consume content within their closed ecosystems and never leave. This is a long-term risk to journalism as we know it and publishers’ underlying business,” said Adam Singolda, Founder and CEO at Taboola. “In 2016 and the years ahead, building audience and gathering better data will become key to enabling publishers to defend their future, and we’re excited to embark on new initiatives in this area, leveraging the combined global scale of AOL, Verizon, and Taboola.”

* Source: comScore Multi-Platform Worldwide Audience Custom Entity Report, November 2015
** Source: Taboola

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About AOL
AOL is a media technology company with a mission to simplify the internet for consumers and creators by unleashing the world’s best builders of culture and code. As one of the largest online properties with over 500 million monthly global consumers of its premium brands and combined Microsoft inventory, AOL is at the center of disruption of how content is being produced, distributed, consumed and monetized by connecting publishers with advertisers on its global, programmatic content and advertising platforms. AOL’s opportunity lies in shaping the future of the digitally connected world for decades to come. AOL is a subsidiary of Verizon.

About Taboola
Taboola is the leading discovery platform, serving over 300 billion recommendations to over 750 million unique visitors every month on some of the Web’s most innovative publisher sites, including USA TODAY, Business Insider, Chicago Tribune and The Weather Channel. Headquartered in New York City, Taboola also has offices in Pasadena, London, Tel Aviv, New Delhi, São Paulo, and Bangkok. 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.