Taboola Signs Deal With ZTE Smartphones For Personalized Content

April 5, 2018 | Israeli content recommendation giant Taboola has signed a deal with Chinese smartphone manufacturer ZTE Corporation to incorporate a new feature that shows Taboola’s recommended links on some of its phones, the companies said Wednesday. “The module will initially include only links to news and lifestyle stories from existing publishing partners, although the company may eventually expand to include paid links from content marketers,” Taboola Chief Executive Adam Singolda said, according to the Wall Street Journal. No word on which exact publishers will be included in the links. Singolda says Taboola pre-installed on ZTE will be a “publisher-friendly Android version of Apple News, the iPhone app developed by Apple Inc. that comes pre-installed on the company’s mobile devices,” but that it won’t be “a stand-alone app.” The Israeli-founded content discovery platform serves over 360 billion recommendations to over 1 billion unique visitors every month on sites like USA Today, Business Insider, and The Weather Channel. Publishers pay Taboola to include their links as recommendations to refer readers to their websites, and Taboola gets a cut of the ad revenue generated on their site. By installing Taboola on its phones, ZTE will get a piece of that ad revenue share.