Adam Singolda is nearly an hour into explaining his sometimes frightening pitch to media companies when he decides to go full Game of Thrones.

"Winter is coming," Singolda says, referring to the catchphrase from the bloody drama. "There is going to be a shake. But we're building the wall."



Winter, as he sees it, is when news outlets become so dependent on social platforms, and Facebook in particular, that they lose all control over their brand identities, user experiences and reader relationships.

"The White Walkers side," Singolda says, referring to the terrifying creatures that humans in the show build a wall to keep out, "is hope as a strategy."

Singolda may be the most brazen in making this pitch, but Taboola is not the only startup looking to capitalize on the rattled nerves of publishers.

This jarring conversation wasn't exactly what I expected when walking past his company's upright piano and cute circular fish tank embedded in one of the many colorful walls, then into Singolda's corner office for an early morning meeting.

But fear, plain and simple, is on some level a key part of Singolda's current business plan at Taboola, a content discovery platform that has raised $160 million to date and is said to be valued at around $1 billion.

The Wall

Media executives, editors and reporters — this reporter included — are fearful of Facebook's power over the industry. It's a topic of conversation inside board rooms, at newsroom happy hours and in media columns. Some of those same media insiders — this reporter included — are also skeptical of Taboola, which can be seen as a symptom of a clickbaity Internet. And now that fear is just starting to find its way into startup pitches.

It's a pitch for salvation coming from an unlikely place. Taboola, along with rival Outbrain (which Mashable uses, and you'll probably see at the bottom of this article), has been criticized in the past for pushing spammy marketing content in recommended reading widgets at the bottom of your favorite news sites.

Now it is gradually establishing itself as a full-service platform to provide publishers with a wealth of data and customization options from the one billion users it claims to reach.

Want to test headlines and packaging for a story based on how that article performed for other publishers, or personalize your website based on broader data showing user tolerance for videos, or predict what stories will pop, or boost newsletter subscriptions? That's the big dream Singolda promises. That's the wall.

In this way, Taboola thinks it can help bolster publisher relationships and traction with readers rather than forfeiting too much of it to Facebook. In this way, Taboola is also not-so-subtly trying to force more comparisons to Facebook rather than Outbrain.

"I’m not worried about what happens if Facebook doesn’t send you traffic. I’m afraid of what happens if it succeeds," Singolda says. "Instant Articles, all of it is within Facebook. You get traffic and all of it is great, but do you even have an identity? Do you know your users? Are they all zombies that just happen to be here and could be somewhere else tomorrow?"

Singolda may be the most brazen in making this pitch, but Taboola is not the only startup looking to capitalize on the rattled nerves of publishers. Another notable media founder I spoke with, who declined to speak on the record as the project is not yet public, is now working on a startup to help publishers "balance out the growing dominance of Facebook."

An example of Taboola's content recommendation widget, as seen on The Daily Mail's website on Monday, May 23, 2016. Image: screengrab, mashable

As Ethan Kurzweil, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, notes, "It's a pitch that has resonance in the moment, but will probably have resonance for awhile because of how strong Facebook is."

"Publishers feel like Facebook will walk them off a cliff to their ultimate death," he added. "They’re probably willing to listen to anybody that has an antidote to that that seems credible."

The Walkers

Facebook, a force in the media world for years, has strengthened its grip in recent months by hosting more videos and articles, and encouraging (sometimes paying) publishers (including Mashable) to produce more live videos. The fear is that media publications forfeit much of their brands, traffic and money-making autonomy for short-term gains.

"Most publishers are crawling over themselves to be part of Facebook's latest offerings, and happy to take Facebook's money to publish to Facebook Live," says Vivian Schiller, former head of news at Twitter and an advisor to Vocativ."Don't blame publishers for this — it's a rough media world right now."

How rough is the media world? This is a time when layoffs are increasingly common. This is a time when a storied newspaper needs the backing of a cancer research firm to survive (because curing cancer isn't hard enough).

And this is a time when the CEO of a criticized content recommendation service like Taboola can look a journalist in the eye and say, "I want to help... I think content should be here forever."

"The irony is publishers could do this themselves if they banded together," Schiller says. "But the legacy of competition among news organizations makes that impossible to imagine happening."

So instead we have Facebook. And we have Taboola.

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