Outbrain’s Galai says the deal demonstrates that his rival is no longer a “true content player.”
“We’re at the fork in the road where the true content players are going to be differentiated from the ad networks and ad-tech that are masquerading as content,” Galai says.
Singolda says content was never his focus. Taboola shows people information they might like, regardless of whether it’s an ad, an article, a social media post, or an app. “The definition of content is minimizing the potential of this category,” he says. “If you limit that to only slideshows and articles by publishers, you’re limiting what people can find and what the publishers can earn from it.”
An existential crisi. In the end, though, Outbrain and Taboola may be solving an impossible problem. Popular content isn’t always good content, and an honest picture of what people want online reflects the ugly, honest truth about the world: People have some pretty unsavory desires.
The most popular content on Taboola’s network is typically how-to advice related to finance and fitness, Singolda says, which is another way of saying that people care a lot about money and looks. On Twitter, Outbrain’s Galai admitted that the Web has bad taste in content: “Sadly, what you see is many times what the audience is engaging with the most,”
“If it were just me setting the global taste of what’s being served to everyone, it would all be Pulitzer-winning content,” he told me. “I cringe when I see Kardashian content. [But] I know it’s the algorithm working as designed.” The only thing Outbrain can do is improve its targeting, so that audiences that want “15 Good Looking Celebrities who destroyed themselves with plastic surgery” will see it and audiences that don’t, wont. “The Kardashian link should be on a celebrity site, but probably not on the hard news section of CNN,” he said.
The shallow desires of the Internet puts Taboola, Outbrain, and publishers in an awkward place. Their algorithms have been finely tuned to offer up the most relevant and click-worthy content on the Web the “best,” by all available metrics, even if it equally repels us and compels us to click.
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