Baidu gets clicky with funding for content discovery startup Taboola

Baidu, China’s biggest search engine company, today announced a multi-million dollar investment in US-based discovery platform Taboola. The exact sum is undisclosed. Taboola is responsible for those “You might also like” or “Around the web” recommendations you see on so many websites that lead to external content. It’s a way for web publishers to make money from something other than conventional ads.

This is a strategic investment that will see Baidu and Taboola working together closely in the Chinese market, but a representative of the search engine company declined to give further details. Taboola has not yet entered the Chinese market. However, it’s already active in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Israel, Thailand, India, and Japan.

“We believe that discovery has massive growth potential in both existing and untapped markets around the world, and we plan to grow this new category even further with Baidu to help change the way people in China discover content they may like and never knew existed,” said Adam Singolda, founder and CEO of Taboola, in a statement this afternoon.

Traffic

The startup has some big-name publishers on board, such as The Atlantic, Politico, and TMZ. A lot of smaller sites also use it to pull in traffic from larger publishers. The platform generates 200 billion content recommendations per month and claims to have 550 million unique users each month. Taboola provides its clients with an analytics dashboard and gives editors the ability to A/B test different headlines.

All of that could be useful to Chinese publishers, which is likely the motivation behind Baidu’s involvement.

Taboola could fit in usefully between the search giant’s ad platform and its Baidu Union service, which specializes in sponsored links. Baidu might also make use of this content discovery further afield and in different languages as the company takes its search engine to new markets like Brazil, and its web-based portals into countries like Indonesia.

New York-based Taboola has previously raised US$157 million from seven rounds of funding. US$117 million of that was raised earlier this year.