Taboola provides a video content recommendation platform. Its marketplace has marketers and brands on one side, who bid to distribute their content on top publisher sites, and algorithms on the other side, to match content with the most relevant users and predict what they want to watch. Brands and marketers use the technology to maximize their reach and optimize audience engagement.

The company compares its service to Twitter Promoted Tweets or Facebook Promoted Stories. It serves 1.5 billion recommendations daily on sites including Time.com, NY Times, Fox Broadcasting, USA Today, Bloomberg, The Weather Channel, and BusinessWeek. Taboola helps publishers “re-circulate” their own traffic by generating on-site content recommendations. (VentureBeat uses Taboola, whose recommendations appear at the bottom of every story on our site.)

Video advertising is expected to be a major trend of 2013. The technology surrounding video production and distribution has made online video ads a powerful option for businesses and consumers alike. Furthermore, studies show the more targeted the ad, the more effective it is. Taboola is capitalizing on all these trends.

After experiencing significant growth in 2012, largely spurred by the $10 million round Taboola closed in June, this funding brings the total capital raised to $25 million. Israeli firm Pitango VC led the $15 million investment, with participation from existing investors Evergreen Venture Partners, WGI Group, and Market. Taboola is based in New York City.

Read the press release. 

Photo credit: Annie Mole/Flickr

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Orbitz is recommending higher priced hotels to Mac users than to PC users. Apple fans immediately took to Twitter with their outrage and the media was ablaze with follow-up articles condemning Orbitz’s discrimination against Mac users.

Well here’s one more article. However, this article is not going to warn businesses of the ills of treating customers differently, as you may have assumed from the title. No, this article celebrates it.

In defense of the travel site, Orbitz’s PR firm released a statement highlighting what the company considered an overlooked fact that Orbitz does not show Mac and PC users the same hotel at different prices. The company blamed The Wall Street Journal for burying this fact in the middle of the article, ultimately misleading many readers. However, people seemed to understand this was the case from the very beginning, and yet were still outraged that Orbitz is even recommending pricier hotels to Mac users. Here’s why Orbitz is actually doing Mac users a favor.

While it’s true that not all Mac users prefer nicer hotels, it’s very important to note that Orbitz found Mac users were in fact spending 30% more a night on hotels and were 40% more likely to book four- or five- star hotels back in October, before they implemented this strategy. That means many Mac users are indeed more interested in and looking for pricier hotels.

The point is, Orbitz identified that Mac users had this pre-existing preference, and then simply made it easier for them to find what they were looking for. Don’t we all prefer a more personalized, relevant shopping experience?

If you’re a regular at my watch store and I know you have a preference for Rolexes, I will show you Rolexes when you walk in the door. For another customer, I may begin by showcasing our selection of Movado watches. Both customers are free to view all of the watches in the store and will be charged the same prices, yet I’ve used the knowledge I have of each customer to recommend the products I believe they will be most interested in. This is essentially what Orbitz is doing. This is personalization.

Still not convinced? Consider this statistic: 54% of consumers are ready to “break up” with brands due to “the barrage of irrelevant messages, low-value rewards, and impersonal engagements”, according to research by CMO Council. And yet, 47% of marketers do not take any action based on consumer preferences. That means simply paying attention to your customers and delivering a tailored experience nearly puts you ahead of the pack, and doing it well makes you exceptional. To that end, I say Bravo, Orbitz.

The Journal article was focused on only one factor — type of computer — that influences Orbitz’s recommendations to users. However, as any data scientist will tell you, using only one piece of data about a visitor is insufficient. Companies need to take a more holistic approach to personalization. Orbitz has said they use other information to determine results, such as your past purchases and location.

So, for all you Mac users who are on a budget, Orbitz hasn’t forgotten you. If you are a Mac user, but have previously always chosen budget hotels, Orbitz probably won’t recommend the higher end hotels to you, though it may do so for other Mac users. Each customer will show indications of her preferences, but it is up to the company to capture those preferences and deliver the appropriate experience.

And that’s personalization. The more a company knows about its customers, the better experience it can provide. The companies, like Orbitz, that are recognizing this early on will be the ones to reap the rewards.

Elie Khoury is Co-Founder and CEO of Woopra, a customer-centric web analytics service that enables companies to target and personalize web experiences.

The actual service starts with a tag that website developers can slap onto the footer of their sites. It tracks what other sites its users visit, what other types of articles they view, and what other products they consider buying. The information is shipped off to remote servers on Baynote’s side that, after a little bit of data crunching, spit out a list of relevant topics and links for each page.

“Every user is being silently watched, and we end up creating peer groups across sites,” said Jack Jia, founder and chairman of Baynote. “And then you are basically guided by those like-minded peer groups to get some better links and results.”

Developers can then add rails to their sites that include relevant pages and products for each incoming web surfer based on these “peer-based recommendations.” The service can also reorganize search engine results for the same purpose, tailoring search results for individual readers.

The service also provides developers with an analytics suite that helps determine which links and tools worked and which ones didn’t. It can also deliver customized landing pages — the page a visitor first sees when they visit websites like Dell.com — based on what kind of site or search result the reader came from. That means the landing page for a site like Dell.com would be different if the reader searched for “gaming laptops” rather than “dell computers,” and would tailor to that search.

On top of the funding, Baynote has snagged former SAP executive vice president Doug Merritt as the company’s new chief executive. The company’s revenue has grown between 70 and 120 percent each year since it was founded in 2005, and grew 75 percent last year. The funding is going to be used for typical growth strategies like developing new tools for web developers and expanding the company’s sales force, Jia said.

Existing investors Hummer Winblad, Steamboat Ventures and JK&B Capital also participated in the round, bringing Baynote’s total funding up to $28 million. The San Jose, Calif.-based company has 80 employees.

Targeted advertising seems to be the hot trend now. It can become a bit of a logistical nightmare to figure out which ads are “good” and which ones aren’t when the attention span of web surfers is so short.

Monetate lets companies field test their ads and figure out which ones work best. The web-based service lets its users add a line of java to their site that transmits data on clicks and advertising effectiveness to the Monetate platform. The service catalogs all that information and then tells its users which ads work best and which ones need improvement. The business-facing part of the service is an analytics suite and dashboard that lets marketers launch targeted advertising campaigns quickly.

The Philadelphia, Penn.-based company was founded in 2008 and has around 30 employees. It became cash-flow positive in 2009 and provides its services to retail websites like Urban Outfitters and The Sports Authority. It raised money through an earlier seed funding round, but wouldn’t disclose how much. The most recent round of funding was led by First Round Capital and Floodgate Fund.

The company, which has offices in London, Paris, and Tel Aviv, specializes in ad “retargeting”. That means it provides advertisers with a learning algorithm that keeps track of which advertisements don’t work. Users are tagged with a “smart” cookie that keeps track of ads that don’t generate some meaningful throughput. That information is then shot back to a server that distributes ads. The server then no longer displays ads that didn’t generate any clicks.

Privacy nuts can rest easy, though. myThings says the algorithms only collect non-personal information and won’t lead to any kind of privacy snafus on the order of the Google Buzz fiasco. Though there are always privacy concerns when any type of information is collected, myThings’ method is similar to the same process that keeps users logged in to e-mail websites like GMail.

myThings is pretty popular in Europe, where its clients include Price Minister — one of the largest e-commerce sites in Europe and a strong competitor to Amazon.com — and a number of other retailers. The company says it has improved advertising throughput on those sites by up to 300 percent with its use of retargeting.

Retargeted advertising is becoming an increasingly popular method of generating relevant advertising for consumers. The throughput boost from using retargeted advertising is around 1,000 percent, according to data from comScore. That’s compared to about a 500 percent boost when targeting advertising based on specific audiences — which would involve collecting a whole lot more private information than retargeting needs.

myThings.com was, at one point, a web service that kept track of what users buy and the clutter of email that comes with it. Retailers uploaded purchase information directly to myThings, and consumers can then access information about the product through myThings’ web site. myThings CEO Benny Arbel decided the information and algorithms were better used to deliver better targeted advertising, and shifted the company’s direction as a result.

myThings had earlier raised $5 million in its second round of fundraising in 2008, and $8 million in its first institutional round in 2006. That brings the company’s total funding up to $19 million.