Regional publisher Johnston Press has partnered with discovery platform Taboola in a bid to drive traffic amongst its network of news websites and seek out new revenue streams.
Taboola’s personalised content recommendations will be integrated across the Johnston Press network of over 200 desktop and mobile sites, including The Scotsman, The Yorkshire Post, Belfast Newsletterand The News, Portsmouth.
“Johnston Press is heavily invested in delivering the most informative and interesting content to our users, and our partnership with Taboola allows us to build on this engagement even further,” said Jeff Moriarty, chief digital and product officer at Johnston Press.
“As mobile traffic becomes increasingly important for us, and we develop highly localised native advertising solutions for customers, Taboola’s best-of-breed content recommendations are proving to be a valuable multi-platform solution.”
Taboola claims it serves over 200 billion recommendations to over 550 million unique visitors every month on some of the web’s biggest publisher sites, including USA TODAY and Business Insider.
In spite of a slump in profit for the half year ending 4 July 2015, Johnston Press has seen digital revenues grow 17.5%, according to the latest financial results from the company, released last month.
Described by group CEO Ashley Highfield as a “challenging” six months, digital revenues increased from £14.1 million to £16.5 million to account for 20.5% of advertising revenues – with digital audiences growing 20.4% to 19.9 million unique users a month.
Johnston Press has around 20 million unique visitors each month across the UK.
