Taboola's Cookies Could Sweeten Video Views for The New York Times

Taboola is not a Middle Eastern grain dish, but an Israeli start-up that provides a solution to surface recommended videos for visitors to CNN.com, HowCast, 5min, Demand Media, the NBA, and now on The New York.

The company has placed cookies on some 50 million unique users and has built profiles around individual viewing interests.  With this large database, the company can provide publishers with a highly targeted list of recommended videos.

These recommended videos are displayed as a series of thumbnails, displayed horizontally or vertically on the page.

The system was just implemented on The New York Times video section.   The videos are listed under the title "Other Videos You May Like."

Taboola provides its hosted service free of charge.  It has various revenue sharing models with publishers.  This mostly involved the insertion of intermittent text ads among the recommended videos.

The company has raised $6 million and opened an office in the U.S. earlier this year.  The most recent raise was last November, TechCrunch reported.

Taboola was founded in 2007 by a team of veteran Israel National Security Agency researchers with experience in practical mathematics and large scale data-mining.

The company recently announced an implementation with Brightcove for Brightcove customers.  A simpler solution from Taboola is widget which is easily embedded on most Web sites and blogs.

I sat down with CEO Adam Singolda in the Beet.TV studios in Manhattan earlier this month.

Andy Plesser, Executive Producer