• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, March 17, 2016

Taboola on Thursday launched Taboola Native, a native ad server that it hopes will help publishers monetize Facebook-like branded content.

The new offering is the content discovery platform’s response to the success of in-feed native advertising on Facebook and Twitter. 

The free, white-labeled version of Taboola’s predictive technology aims to help publishers monetize premium native placements, open new direct sales channels and guarantee 100% fill rates from the company’s sponsored content marketplace for any unsold inventory.

“Taboola Native is an alternative to Facebook Instant Articles,” said Adam Singolda, founder and CEO, Taboola. “We see this as an opportunity for publishers to unlock the full monetization potential of native advertising. Think of it as a DoubleClick 2.0,” he said.

Taboola Native will serve native content that can live on a publishers’ own site or anywhere on the Web. Until now, only Facebook and Twitter could do that, Singolda noted. “This is Facebook-like technology. Using Taboola Native, a publisher can approach a brand and say 'give us a thousand pieces of your content and we’ll match the content to the right people.'"

For example, say an auto brand wants to be on the home page of an auto publisher. The brand has already created the content. Taboola Native can recommend the right content to the right readers.

Publishers using the product include: American Media, Inc. (publisher of Radar Online, OK! magazine, and Men’s Fitness), New York Daily News, and Trusted Media Brands, Inc. (publisher of Reader’s Digest and Taste of Home) in the U.S.; Daily Mail, ESI Media (publisher of The Independent and London Evening Standard); and Bhaskar, Jagran, NDTV and OneIndia in Asia-Pacific.

“Every publisher is thinking about how to grapple with the shift toward mobile, where consumers are spending more and more of their time, and where it is increasingly difficult to monetize with older digital ad formats like display. 'Native' presents us with a way to seamlessly integrate promoted content into the user experience and provide real value to readers," said Rich Sutton, chief revenue officer at Trusted Media Brands, via email.

"But in order to maximize the full potential that this new channel can offer, publishers will have to think about how to effectively leverage off-site branded content, in addition to the bespoke content they may already be creating for advertiser partners," Sutton added.

“There’s a world of branded content that’s already out there," Singolda explained. “It’s on YouTube, on social platforms, on company blogs -- and brands want to promote it and get the right people to discover it.” In contrast to traditional native advertising servers, Taboola Native positions itself as a platform for publishers to directly sell and promote not only custom content, but all the other off-site branded content from across the Web.

The product uses predictive technology to index and recommend thousands of branded content pieces, matching each consumer with the most relevant piece of content at the right time.