Yahoo launches personalized content recommendation tool for publishers

Look out Outbrain and Taboola, Yahoo is about to start eating your lunches with the company’s latest product launch.

Today Yahoo announced a new service for digital publishers called Yahoo Recommends, which provides digital publishers with a personalized content recommendation tool to keep readers engaged with content on a particular site. The new tools are notable because it marks the first time Yahoo’s marketplace has offered ad inventory and served ads beyond Yahoo-branded content sites, according to Yahoo SVP Mike Kerns.

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Essentially, the tool will show readers links to additional related content (via a banner embedded into the website) or point them to content they’re likely to enjoy based on their current visit to the site. Yahoo will also include relevant ads — served by Yahoo Gemini — mixed in with those content recommendations, giving publishers a way to boost revenue.  It’s very similar to what Outbrain and Taboola already offer to several top digital publishers, including VentureBeat.

Publishers that want to use the Yahoo Recommends tool just need to register their content with Yahoo, then add a widget to their content pages. The tool is supposed to scale across both mobile and desktop, as well as offer publishers access to analytics on how ads and content recommendations are performing. The company already has a handful of notable publishers using the tool, including CBS Interactive and Vox Media.