Since then, I’ve had some pretty compelling conversations. First, I spoke with Adam Singolda, the founder and CEO of Taboola, one of two companies responsible for the “Doctors Hate Him” and “Here’s What The Kids From The Goonies Look Like Now” native ads you see on sites across the web. My British editor called these “chumboxes.”
The Taboola business is predicated on the health of the open web, which is not looking so healthy lately. As necessity is the mother of invention, Taboola recently unveiled a new product, called DeeperDive, which effectively acts as an answer engine that lives on publisher websites, ingests only their data, and produces answers that surface other relevant content from those websites. It is essentially a recirculation widget for the chatbot era. So far, the tool is live on Gannett’s USA Today website, but Taboola has plans to announce expansions soon, Singolda told me.
His argument: All the traffic lost to answer engines is lost to answer engines, and tools like DeeperDive are not remedies for that. Instead, what they seek to do is mimic a new behavior that users are becoming increasingly accustomed to—the chatbot interfaces—and enabling that behavior on publisher websites. This way, whatever percentage of direct traffic a publisher has, the gizmo deepens their engagement, encouraging them to spend far longer on the page and offering up a gold mine of first-party data in the process.
The next day, I had a call with the founder of a stealth startup working on effectively the same product. Their widget is live on two websites, but they have politely asked me not to say more until Oct. 1, so I am reluctantly complying. But they had the same thesis: This does not recover lost traffic, but it does deepen engagement of existing users.
I found this a somewhat more reasonable explanation, so I put it to Gabriel Dorosz, the former head of audience strategy at The New York Times, to hear his thoughts. I had unwittingly stumbled into a trap, however, as Dorosz has recently been doing some consulting work with the International News Media Association (INMA), which, would you believe it, has also recently launched a publisher answer engine of its own. Naturally, Dorosz was bullish.
He encouraged me to think of these publisher answer engines in two buckets. First, there are the free ones, such as DeeperDive and this stealth startup. Second, there are those available on paywalled, subscription-only sites, whose content is theoretically exclusive, un-scrapable, and quite valuable.
