Assessing the Value of User Data in Online Native Advertising

Project Description

Background:

Taboola is the leading global recommendation platform, serving over 470 billion recommendations to over 1.3 billion people every month on some of the Web’s most innovative digital properties, including USA TODAY, Huffington Post, MSN, Business Insider, Chicago Tribune and The Weather Channel. Headquartered in New York City, Taboola also has offices in Los Angeles, London, Tel Aviv, New Delhi, Bangkok, São Paulo, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Istanbul, Sydney and Tokyo. Taboola’s global reach is second only to Google’s and currently, 88% of America and 83% of the UK sees a Taboola recommendation 2-3 times a day. Over 60% of the business is in mobile web and mobile apps.

Taboola collects and analyzes a vast amount and range of non PII user data, most of which is related to the online behavior and content consumption of users. In addition, Taboola operates the industry's most comprehennsive data marketplace, allowing advertisers to utilize data and segments from numerous 3rd part providers in addition to Taboola segments.

User data at Taboola creates value through 2 primary mechanisms: 

• Targeting (used by clients)
• Personalization (used by Taboola's recommendation engine and other products)

Both of these mechanisms are ultimately related to the Revenue per Thousand page views (RPM) that Taboola is able to generate for it's supply partners (web publishers, apps, browsers etc. that use Taboola's product to monetize traffic). Both are also linked to the Cost Per Action (CPA) Taboola advertisers effectively pay.

Objectives:

• To estimate the value of user data in RPM and/or CPA terms
• To estimate the impact of a change in the average persistancy of user data on these metrics

Relevant Know-How and Experience:

Knowledge of real life cases of use of data in online advertising where insights were derived on the impact/value of data. Cases in other verticals (retail, healthcare...) may be relevant given high degree of similarity in other dimentions. 

Please do not submit a proposal if you don't have relevant data to share (i.e. a story through which interesting data points related to the research question can be learned). We aren't looking for amazing dta scientists with a great idea as to how they would go about solving this (not yet :) ) . We are looking for interesting information on relevant businesses (even anonymized). So ask yourself:

1. Do you have a good case study with quantititive information?
2. Can you share information about how companies in the advertising space have calculated the value of data?

Please note this will be a paid exploratory call for 1-2 hours. We are open to engaging with multiple experts if you do have relevant insight as per questions and information above.  There will be no interviews for this project. This could lead to further paid engagements depending on the call.