About Taboola
Taboola is a technology company that powers recommendations across the Open Web with an artificial intelligence, or AI-based, algorithmic engine that we have developed since the Company began operations in 2007. Taboola has also expanded more directly into e-Commerce, allowing its partners with digital properties the ability to use its platforms to display advertising suited to the audiences of those partners’ websites or other digital services.
We think of ourselves as a search engine, but in reverse — instead of expecting people to search for information, we recommend information to people or enable our partners to use our technology. You’ve seen us before: we partner with websites, devices and mobile apps, which we collectively refer to as digital properties, to recommend editorial content and advertisements on the Open Web, outside of the closed ecosystems of the walled gardens such as Facebook, Google and Amazon.
Digital properties use our technology platforms to achieve their business goals, such as driving new audiences to their sites and apps, or increasing engagement on site — and we don’t charge them for these services. We also provide a meaningful monetization opportunity to digital properties by surfacing paid recommendations by advertisers. Unlike walled gardens, we are a business-to-business, or B2B, company with no competing consumer interests. We only interact with consumers through our partners’ digital properties, hence we do not compete with our partners for user attention. Our motivations are aligned. When our partners win, we win and we grow together.
We empower advertisers, merchants and affiliate networks, which we individually and collectively refer to as advertisers, to leverage our proprietary AI-powered recommendation platform to reach targeted audiences utilizing effective, native ad formats across digital properties. We generate revenues primarily when people (consumers) click on, purchase from or, in some cases, view the ads that appear within our partners’ digital experiences via our recommendation platform. Advertisers pay us for those clicks, purchases or impressions, and we share the resulting revenue with the digital properties who display those ads and generate those clicks and downstream consumer actions.
Our powerful recommendation platform was built to address a technology challenge of significant complexity: predicting which recommendations users would be interested in, without explicit intent data or social media profiles. Search advertising platforms have access, at a minimum, to users’ search queries which indicate intent, while social media advertising platforms have access to rich personal profiles created by users. In contrast, we base our recommendations on an extensive dataset of context and user behavior derived from the intersection of thousands of digital properties and millions of recommended items, including ads and editorial content.
2023 Business Overview
2023 Accomplishments and Growth Initiatives
2023 was an investment year for Taboola’s growth. We successfully launched Maximize Conversions, our first offering in our AI-bidding technology suite that should significantly improve advertiser success and yield on our platform; successfully onboarded Yahoo’s global native supply onto the Taboola network; and launched technology that advances our eCommerce, Taboola News and Header Bidder offerings.
In 2023, we also returned approximately $55 million of capital to our shareholders as part of our publicly announced share buyback program.
Additional Developments and Growth Initiatives
Notable new and renewed publisher wins in 2023 included Gannett, Time, Nexstar Media, Barstool Sports, G/O Media, Cambium Media, Futura, Disney, Unidad Editorial, BBC, One India, The Print, Bangkok Post, A360 Media, Postmedia, NDTV, and Cox Media.
Taboola News had a spectacular growth year in 2023, where revenue grew to over $100 million. In Q3, we also rolled out a new partnership with realme, the world’s fastest-growing smartphone brand. Under the partnership, realme is using Taboola News to power recommendations within all devices for audiences in Europe, and Southeast Asia. In 2023, we introduced new features to
