Johnston Press signs digital deal with Taboola

Publisher Johnston Press has teamed up with a US content discovery specialist in an effort to boost traffic across its desktop and mobile sites.

The Edinburgh-based group has signed an exclusive, multi-year partnership with Taboola, which offers personalised content recommendations.

The recommendations will be integrated across the Johnston Press network of more than 200 sites.

They include The Scotsman, The Yorkshire Post and Belfast Newsletter.

New York-based Taboola said the partnership would enable Johnston Press to drive high-quality traffic to its sister sites "while also engaging visitors with sponsored content from around the Web, creating a new revenue stream for the publisher".

Johnston Press chief digital and product officer Jeff Moriarty said: "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.

"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."

The publisher has about 20 million unique online visitors each month across the UK.

Last month it reported a 17.5% rise in digital advertising for the first half of this year.