Taboola is the company behind those “Recommended For You” content widgets you see at the bottom of news articles everywhere. Founded in 2007 by Adam Singolda in Israel, it’s now headquartered in New York and operates one of the largest content discovery platforms on the open web.
The business model is straightforward: publishers like NBC News, Bloomberg, and Le Monde install Taboola’s widget to monetize their pages, while advertisers pay to have their content (articles, videos, product pages) recommended to readers. Taboola reaches over 500 million daily active users across its publisher network.
In 2024, Taboola signed a 30-year exclusive deal with Apple to power native advertising in Apple News and Apple Stocks, replacing the previous arrangement. That partnership alone significantly expanded Taboola’s premium inventory and gave it a major edge over rival Outbrain.
Speaking of Outbrain — the two companies attempted a merger in 2019, but it fell apart in 2020 due to regulatory concerns and disagreements. Taboola then went public via SPAC in 2021 at a $2.6 billion valuation, though the stock has had a rough ride since.
Taboola Realize, the company’s AI engine, analyzes reading patterns and user behavior to match content recommendations. The company has been pushing further into performance advertising (direct response, e-commerce) rather than just content recommendation, trying to compete more directly with Meta and Google for performance ad budgets. Revenue reached about $1.7 billion in 2023.
