Content Discovery Platform Taboola Advances Its Global Plans By Announcing It Is Now The Largest

Taboola, which has big plans to create a new category that combines content, personalization and advertising, is announcing today that it is the largest discovery platform in the world.

The claim is based on data from analytics firm comScore that pegs the platform as reaching 639.5 million unique desktop users.

Although the company is just now announcing its new top dog position because it just recently got the stats, it actually crossed over about Labor Day. ShareThis, which had occupied the top slot, fell to second place and Outbrain is in third:

Like its competitors, Taboola offers those “you might also be interested in…” links and thumbnail images at the bottom of countless articles across the web. Publishers pay for clicks on their content, which brings users to their site.

This new ranking, founder and CEO Adam Singolda told me via email, “confirms that our strategy of investing in product and technology is helping us grow at a rapid pace globally.”

He specifically attributed the new ranking to “some massive wins we had this year, [including] aggressive international expansion into markets such as Brazil, Mexico, Germany, Australia, China, Japan and Korea.”

He added that “the more supply we have, the more attractive we are to brands, [and] the more content [that] is distributed through us, the better our personalization works.” Accordingly, he said, the company expects to “double down” on its plans to invest in technology and products.

The company’s ambition is to build a new category called Discovery that is, he said, “similar to a search engine, but in reverse.”

That is, Taboola’s predictive tech presents information to users that are most likely to engage with the content, rather than “expecting people to type keywords or phrase into a search bar.” Singolda has in the past talked about expanding this model to other kinds of content, like recommendations for products and services.

The company also said that its stories are now being clicked more than 1.15 billion times monthly, a new milestone for the company. By comparison, it reports that it generated a mere 363 million clicks in November of last year.

Also last year, Taboola announced that it reached 86 percent of all U.S. desktop users — more than Facebook.

Last summer, it teamed up with Yahoo Japan to provide content recommendation through Yahoo News. It also bought Perfect Market, a provider of publishing software solutions, so that it could offer programmatic advertising through a new offering called Taboola-X.