Posted on Monday, July 28th, 2014 by Shachar Pessis
Blogs are written by people and these people need to be paid. This is why we chose Taboola to help us monetize our blog.
If you read online you probably noticed that nowadays almost all of the news or blog posts end with a ‘you may like’ or ‘around the web’ section, same goes to us here at All My Faves. There are many companies that offer these content discovery widgets. We have tested several of them and eventually chose to work with Taboola. This is why.
Content is KingFor the past 8 years we have been recommending the coolest websites to our readers. Our team of editors sniff around hundreds of services every week and hand-pick 10 interesting and unique websites and apps, which we call our ‘Weekly Faves‘. These are the sites we were most impressed by and the ones we wish to pay forward to our users. Think of it as the ‘crème de la crème’ of the Internet on a weekly basis.
As our intentions are delivering our readers with the best sites out there, we also wish to monetize our blog with the best Content You May Like. That is exactly what Taboola offers. A-list sites such as Wonderwall, The Motley Fool and many more linking to meaningful content that our readers appreciate.
Why a Great Image is Everything in Digital Marketing‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ has never been truer than it is today. Let’s be honest, how many times did you click through to another article without even reading the title, simply because you couldn’t resist the image. Taboola understands the power of imagery and offers clear, unique and large images your users will simply want to click through. 
Taboola’s images are usually 220*180 and that differentiates them from their competitors that offer much smaller and usually square images.
Don’t be mistaken, an intriguing title is still super important for your click through rate, but without a great image it wouldn’t work – that is the secret of Taboola.
I am not talking about copycatting big brands in terms of product or content (which might also be smart, but that is a story for a different blog post). In this case I am talking about copycatting them in terms of monetization.
For me it was enough to see that Huffington Post, Business Insider, TMZ, Viral Nova and many more reputable sites that are using Taboola in order to understand that it should be my ‘you may like’ content provider.
The pioneer of ‘you may like’ content was Outbrain, which is currently the biggest provider with more than 150 Billion links recommended every month. The only problem is that Outbrain doesn’t work with the small players like me. They are only interested in the heavy guns such as CNN, Fox News, BBC, etc… Small businesses have the option of working with them, but the profits are donated to certain charities – this is very nice, but still, you got a business to run.
Content.ad is also a worthy player, we tried them for a while however we weren’t satisfied with the content they promoted. They offered many stop snoring, muscle building and fat belly posts. That is not the type of content I want to share with my users.
nRelate from the IAC group is also a big player with great content, however their images were dull and not intriguing which resulted in a lower CTR than Taboola.
There are many more similar providers out there, we haven’t personally tested them, but we got them listed here so if you try them please share your experience with us.
The Bottom LineWe have tried four different providers in this field and without hesitation we would say that Taboola offers the best product. Great content with beautiful images that results in the best CTR and revenue for you as a publisher.
