The viewership of display ads is shrinking. Ad revenues are shifting to mobile friendly non-intrusive content ads. Widgets recommend content, and are used by the publishers. They are links such as You Might Like, Recommended for You, Sponsored Content or Around the Web. They appear below the stories so as to look an organic part of the story. These enable publishers to maximise the benefits of space available to them and make additional revenues.

The content recommendation networks in India are Taboola, Revcontent, Outbrain and Columbia. In fact, all major publishers in India use some kind of content recommendation widget. It is a clickbait.

Widgets improve the traffic and widgets are used to rent the real estate to other publishers and get paid when a reader clicks on one of these external links.

NDTV receives 80 percent revenues from the banner ads, while the remaining 20 per cent comes from Taboola. The publisher is not required to make any investment. Though the traffic is taken away from the site, still money is made when these links are clicked. ScoopWhoop receives 5-7 per cent of the total revenues from Taboola. Another 15 per cent comes from display ads. And 80 per cent from the branded content.

Content recommendation platforms work best for publishers who work on scale and reach a large number of people. These platforms are working closely with the publishers to enable contextualized and personalised content discovery.