Taboola

Taboola, Inc. is a publicly traded advertising and technology company headquartered in New York City. It provides "content recommendation" native advertising on its partner websites.

History
Taboola was founded in 2007 by Adam Singolda. The company was founded in Israel and initially provided a recommendation engine for video content. The company headquarters were later moved to New York City. Taboola raised $1.5 million in funding in November 2007. This was followed by $4.5 million in November 2008 and $9 million in August 2011. Additionally, Taboola raised $15 million in February 2013. By 2019, Taboola was used to provide 450 billion recommendations every month, due to adoption by major news websites, like the IBM-owned The Weather Company.

In 2014, Taboola acquired a California-based programmatic advertising company called Perfect Market. In February 2015, Taboola raised $117 million in a Series E funding round. In May of that year, Taboola announced additional funding from Baidu for an undisclosed amount. In July 2016, Taboola acquired Convert Media, a recommendation engine for video content. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In January 2017, Taboola acquired a website personalization firm called Commerce Sciences, for an undisclosed sum. Commerce Sciences' technology may re-work a website's layout, based on whether a user is more likely to click on a banner ad, newsletter, or video.

In October 2019, Taboola announced its intention to merge with its rival, Outbrain, subject to regulatory approval. If implemented, the deal would have combined the internet's two largest content-recommendation companies. The aim of this merger was for the two companies to reach a bigger audience to be more competitive against the advertising activities of companies like Google and Facebook. Under the terms of the deal, Taboola would have paid Outbrain shareholders 30 percent of the combined company's stock and $250 million in cash.

The sharp downturn in advertising revenue caused by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 was felt more keenly by Taboola and Outbrain due to increasing pushback by advertisers for the low-quality ads being placed by these companies. This market negative dynamic brought back Taboola and Outbrain to the negotiating table. Both companies stated their ad rates dropped by double digits at the start of the pandemic. The Wall Street Journal reported that the drop in revenue made it harder for Taboola and Outbrain to continue to make their fixed payments to publishers. In September 2020, Taboola and Outbrain could not agree on revised terms and decided to continue as independent organizations. Taboola CEO Adam Singolda said the merger "failed because of the financial contribution of Outbrain" in the previous 12 months. Singolda also said Outbrain “tried to do a deal that was equity only (but less equity), or equity and cash (but less cash) that matched Outbrain’s financial contribution to Taboola." The combined valuation of the called off merger would have been $2 billion.

On 30 June 2021, Taboola began publicly trading on the Nasdaq at a valuation of around $2.6 billion following a merger with special purpose acquisition company ION Acquisition Corp. On 23 July 2021, Taboola announced it was acquiring Connexity, a marketing technology company that operates a retail- and e-commerce-focused advertising network, for $800M from Symphony Technology Group. According to the announcement, the company would become Taboola's e-commerce arm following the completion of the acquisition.

Yahoo partnership
On November 28, 2022, Taboola announced that it had signed a 30-year, exclusive commercial agreement with Yahoo!. Under the deal, Taboola will exclusively power native advertising on all of Yahoo's digital properties globally, such as Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! News, AOL and Engadget, with Taboola Ads also available to buy through the Yahoo DSP. Yahoo is receiving 24.99% of Taboola's total issued and outstanding shares as part of the agreement, as well as one representative on the Taboola Board of Directors.

Products
Taboola creates the "Around The Web" and "Recommended For You" boxes at the bottom of many webpages. Additionally, it can recommend relevant content, including video content. Taboola is used by content publishers to encourage users to view more articles on the same site, or to gain revenues for referral traffic. Marketers and brands bid for views of their content. Then, an algorithm displays the advertiser's content to certain website users based on the content the user is viewing, the content's length and metadata, the user's history, and other factors. Taboola also has tools for publishers to remove offensive content and vet ads before they are displayed.

Taboola serves approximately 450 billion article recommendations each month. It is implemented on a website with a line of JavaScript. The Taboola Choice feature, which was introduced in 2013, added the ability for users to filter out recommendations they do not want to see. An API for mobile apps was added in December. Taboola started working on extending more features to mobile devices, user-generated content, and apps in 2015. In 2017, the company added a Facebook-like scrollable feed of links to articles and videos.

Reception
The online thumbnail grid ads promoted by Taboola and other similar companies like Outbrain have been referred to also as chumbox ads. According to Fortune in 2014, "Popular content isn't always good content.", with Fortune stating that while companies that partnered with Taboola and Outbrain for advertising generally earned significant income from the partnership, the ads recommended by these services "often represent the worst of the Web". Advertiser-sponsored content displayed through the platform might include articles such as "The World's Cutest Cat Pictures All On One Site" or "Jeff Bridges' Magnificent Home Is Beyond Stunning". In May 2013, Taboola founder Adam Singolda said the ads help support a sustainable business model for journalism and the company vets ads before they are displayed. The company has faced criticism for its promoted content alongside the rest of the native advertising industry, including concerns about the promotion of clickbait articles. According to comments made to the BBC, Singolda has said "The problem is that for everyone who hates one piece of content, many others love it, and click on it... if no one clicked on it, or tweeted about it, then we would remove it."

In May 2014, the Better Business Bureau's (BBB) National Advertising Division (NAD) requested that Taboola make it clearer that its recommended links are sponsored by advertisers following a complaint by a rival company, Congoo. The NAD said it recommended the changes, citing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), due to concerns that Taboola's "sponsored content" disclosures "were not sufficiently clear and conspicuous, or easy to notice, read, and understand."

A report in September 2016 from the nonprofit ChangeAdvertising.org found that 41 of the top 50 news sites – including The Guardian, CNN, Time and Forbes – embed widgets from so-called “content-recommendation” companies, including Taboola. Several of those that do not, including The New York Times, pay for content created with advertisers in-house to appear in the widgets to increase traffic to their sites. In 2016, the Taboola widget was installed on a site promoting numerous fake news stories and subsequently appeared in several articles originating from the site, including one claiming Muslim nurses were refusing to wash their hands before surgery at hospitals in the United Kingdom. Taboola subsequently confirmed that the site operators had displayed its code without permission and that they had since removed their code from the site. A company spokesperson said that "Taboola has a very clear and strict set of guidelines in terms of both fake news as well as trademark infringement".

In 2018, regarding the brand safety issue for marketers, Taboola's CEO mentioned that the company employed less than 50 people monitoring 30+ languages, and has established partnerships with IAB, Moat, TAG, Integral Ad Science, and Double Verify to address the issue.

In February 2022, Taboola, a member of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK, was awarded the Gold Standard 2.0 Certification by the organization. Some critics have argued that the IAB UK's self-regulatory model and efforts in governmental lobbying may prioritize the interests of its members, which include companies like Taboola, over stricter governmental regulations.

Independent research conducted in January 2024 found that hundreds of major brands have their ads displayed on "Made for Advertising” websites, which are websites that are created for the sole purpose of showing ads. Ad tech vendors, including Taboola, claim to be taking steps to avoid placing ads on MFA sites, but the study found that these efforts appear to be ineffective.