Conference Transcript - TBLA 2026-09-08

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

Let's get started. My name is Ron Josie. I cover the internet sector here at Citi. And I'm always excited to have my old friend, Adam Singola, here with us today, the CEO founder, co-founder of Taboola. We've known each other for a number of years now, I think. I was thinking about what the right icebreaker is, and we were talking about this just now as we catch up. Tell me about your latest Lego set, and then we'll go into the real business.

Adam Singolda, CEO

I'm building the Formula One car. It's probably like 2,000 pieces, so not that big. I was trying to count.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

With the kids or on your own?

Adam Singolda, CEO

So we each have their own. My son is doing this like art piece. My daughter is doing a unicorn. And the other one is doing, I think, a Super Mario. So we have a, you know, I realized that I enjoy, I matter too. I can't just do things with them all the time. So that's where I'm right now. It's fun.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

You matter too. I think that's, I don't disagree. So why don't we kick off here? And, you know, I would love to level set for everybody in the audience listening on the webcast. Just give us an overview of Taboola. Just the evolution of performance advertising has been pretty extraordinary. It just continues to be a greater part of most companies' budgets. And so just talk to us about Taboola's approach and where things are going from a performance advertising perspective.

Adam Singolda, CEO

One, I think, you know, over the last few years, you know, you've seen, for those who may not know, Taboola is the largest kind of outcome or performance advertising platform outside of Google and Facebook. So we specialize in helping businesses big and small to reach a certain outcome that matches their growth strategy. So they always go to Google first. They go to Meta. Then they get capped out, and they're looking for other partners that can help them satisfy that. The definition of what's outside of search and social changed over the years. It used to be publishers at www someone. And then over the last five, 10 years, it evolved into anyone that wants a piece of the advertising market. Uber is making money from ads. The number one line of EBITDA for Amazon is ads and services. Netflix said they'll never do ads. Now they love ads. Everyone is in the advertising business, and everyone needs a good friend that's not maybe Google or Facebook. And that's where we fit in. So I think the market has evolved, to your question, from just traditional open web websites to apps, OEM manufacturers, utility, email providers, just anyone that wants to make money from ads. That's one thing that changed. Two, the world is crazy. So the idea that you can spend money not knowing what's going to happen with that money over time went down. You're really expected to have an attribution model that allows you to spend and know that it is working. And so that's also changed. And the third minute change is AI. That's reshuffled everything. Conversational ads, the idea that consumers now talk to you, how is that going to be monetized, what type of data that creates. We just had on stage here before we joined the stage, we had Mike Reed from USA Today, and that's obviously a big part of what they talked about.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

So let's get into that in terms of how the online ad market is changing. Before I do, if you could just give us a level set of the online ad market in your view, healthy, building, challenged, how would you look at the market overall in terms of demand?

Adam Singolda, CEO

I think it's, for the most part, stable, especially as there's a more focus on performance. Performance advertising tends to be more stable. It's the last thing you stop, so I would say it's mostly stable. Of course, we're seeing pockets in geographies where things are a bit different. And then the biggest thing in the future, which I'm sure we'll get into, is if consumers are going to be conversing so much with LLM, how is that going to transpire into – what does that mean to the economy and advertising? But outside of that, I think today it's pretty stable.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

Certain geos, we hear a lot about how decent in the U.S. from an advertising demand perspective. So with that, Adam, you actually highlighted a topic that I think is coming up in every single conversation, which is how Gen AI is changing how we all interact with the web. And agents, you can easily see how you can have that conversation. You're already having a conversation with agents. A lot of companies are launching these agents that are your best friends or can do everything for you on your behalf. just talk to us about how the internet can evolve or how it evolves with agents being your front door to a certain extent like things are changing in terms of how we go online and what we do online I would divide it into two parts that I think are interesting to understand as investors as well that are looking to spend money in this ecosystem or not so on one side you have the demand side how will AI affect billions of dollars kind of flowing into the open web and anywhere else.

Adam Singolda, CEO

And I think the biggest change there is the evolution from programmatic, which is a protocol that has been used for the last 30 years by agencies and advertisers to buy ads. And you know this really well. You covered many companies in that space.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

I'm smiling because 30 years seems like a long time, yet we're still in the evolution of programmatic.

Adam Singolda, CEO

Well, I think it's going to be evolved into nothing. I think it's evolving into, I think it may be replaced over time. We can discuss what's over time. But when you're an agency and you're spending $60 billion a year on programmatic and ads and you have an opportunity to build your own buying machine using Cloud Code or Codex or maybe SpaceX with Cursor now and you can own the IP that buys those ads and you can bypass everything on the way straight to the supplier. You can go straight to the consumer and negotiate with a different agent. That is a massive revolution we have never seen in ATT&CK in a very long time. The idea that you don't need any more DSPs. you can just bypass everything, go straight to the consumer on the other side and negotiate with an agent and ask that agent questions to buy and place an ad. So I think that's one of the biggest changes that might happen on the demand side, which would affect agencies, DSPs, ethic in general, agents buying from agents versus programmatic protocol that is like an old me, like such an old protocol. It's so inefficient. It can take advantage of all the first-party data that's available out there. I think it's going to be deprecated. How fast, I don't know, but I think faster than we can imagine. So that's one change.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

Maybe with that change, agents buying from agents, we're hearing that more and more. That's on the call of B2B, B2C programmatic side, I guess, is the question. Is that happening today? And give us an example of what that could be.

Adam Singolda, CEO

So for us, we announced a quarter ago that we've launched a cloud skill and an MCP, a bridge from anyone who wants to buy Taboola and place ads on Apple News, on ESPN, on Yahoo Mail, like amazing, you know, parts of the internet through cloud code. Never talking to Taboola. No need to know our dashboard. No need to talk to an account manager. No need to rely on our reporting. Everything through your Mac. Like open your $20 subscription, open an account on Taboola and tell Claude, place my ads on. I want sports, as we know, is a big category. I want to be on ESPN. Can I do it? And you buy from Taboola. We just made it available and it's already making millions of dollars for us. Some people we don't even know. And I think so. We're seeing signs of that. Do I think it's happening in a big scale? but I can tell you all the holding companies, the agencies who spend tens of billions of dollars, that's all they do now. They're all building their agents, buying arms that can interact with different suppliers that have unique data and unique distribution. I just don't know how fast it will happen, but look, we're seeing merges between different agencies. We're seeing acquisitions for data purposes. We're seeing actually things are happening. So I do think it will happen and we're seeing small signs of that as of now that I mentioned.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

And these are, I mean, so with the skill that you built, so I've got two follow-up questions here. How long did it take you to build it? One. And then two, we're talking performance advertising, performance marketing. So this expands your funnel, your number of advertisers that could use Taboola to reach everybody within Yahoo Mail that meets a certain parameter.

Adam Singolda, CEO

So talk to us about how you're advertising what type of advertisers are coming on with this new skill so how long did it take using ai in the development cycle to give us a sense and then who's who's yeah the the time to build it was not that long uh because it still eventually uses tabula's engine in the back end so claude is just talking claude became the best account manager right it's like a thousand it's the best account managers we've never we've ever had and they're not just they're just using our system so it's but it's still our engine called realize so realize is our is our pmax or our kind of ad engine so claude is just the best account manager using that uh so that's obviously still most of the work is on our side but claude just studied all of our documentations everything that was ever written yeah uh and then just built you know all the directors it needs to become an expert uh so that that wasn't that long the type of advertisers is still roughly the same so we're still very good with like mid you know mid-funnel kind of mid-sized advertisers we're making a push towards bigger advertisers towards agencies because we think that's the right time to do that and I do think still that most of the money that will come through MCPs will still come from bigger advertisers than agencies I think for a while over time I do want a lot of advertisers but I don't suspect that will be most of our growth at least for the foreseen future I think we'll have we'll have more advertisers but sizable ones. We call them scaled advertisers that essentially means over 100 grand a year, you become someone that has found a product market fit with Taboola.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

That's helpful. That was one aspect of AI in the front door. What was the other aspect?

Adam Singolda, CEO

You have very good memory, Ron, The second thing is on the consumer side and the supply side. And I think over there, we're going to see a big part of the internet as we know it transforming into conversational. So I mentioned Eustat Today. We've launched with them in September of last year, Deeper Dive, which essentially allows anyone to go to Eustat Today and ask any question they want about something that is covered by trusted humans that have covered the space. So with the Knicks, I obviously won the championship. I hope you all love the Knicks, and otherwise they should leave the room immediately.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

You have several Villanova graduates here.

Adam Singolda, CEO

Yes, amen. So it's my son's dream. so when that happened I went to USA Today and I talked about the Knicks all the time and I found myself speaking 8, 9, 10 minutes about what the chances were going to win compared to a few years before and I'm doing this, no hallucination just using USA Today content and then it says by the way if you're on that topic read that article, you should read that and watch that and it's a way better experience for me because when you love sports if you love sports you never go to chat gpt and hey tell me that tell me yesterday's score that's because it's not what you want an emotion you want to watch the highlights right you want to you want to get a point of view of the post maybe the new york post you're part of the community so to have that experience in the community and talk and watch and interact is such a better experience so i think on the supply side we'll see a huge surge in different types of companies making conversation available for their consumers. Look, the Lakers were bought for $12 billion. People believe that communities matter in the world of machines. So I do think that we'll see deeper data, which is like services. I'm not saying we'll be the only one, but kind of like AI layers that offer consumers to do what they are now being trained to do, which is talk to me.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

How do you think we access the talk to me?

Adam Singolda, CEO

So who are, is it going to be from, you know one of one of chat gpt's latest models is it going to be metas hatch that we're talking about is it going to be you know these newer bots that are coming on i can tell you how we do it so we have a bunch of uh when we started that we've had a bunch of open source models and then we used our unique data about consumer readership on the internet to train those models and and find them and refine them and then we are lucky because we have a huge you know distribution of servers around the world. So from a CapEx perspective, where I think a lot of companies struggle because it's very expensive and the APIs are very expensive, we were very fortunate that we've had the CapEx to support hosting those models on our own servers and training the models based on our own unique data, which made it very affordable for us to make it available for free. And the second thing is then how do you make money from that? Because otherwise, AI can just be a cost center. So we show, again, we're lucky because most of our $2 billion in revenue is direct demand. so we can absorb the right ad to monetize that conversation. And I can tell you, and I spoke about this publicly, when you show an ad that's relevant for the consumer inside a conversation, the CPM of that ad and the value to the advertiser of that ad is five to ten times higher than an ad on the open web on a display on a homepage. It is ridiculously valuable for the advertiser. The raw ask is so much better.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

Because it's super targeted. And it's exactly what someone's having this conversation on.

Adam Singolda, CEO

And I think when consumers are having conversations, they become superhuman. They're so intentional about what they want to do next. So it's like you pre-qualify those consumers. You have intense signals for the first time. We know Google is a good business. But for the first time, now use it today to get a taste of Google search business through DeeperDive. because those signals become available to them. And they see, on Newset today, I mean, it's more than 10 million questions a month. Can you imagine that you come to work and you have access to tens of millions of questions of your consumers on your own site? Now you can decide what to cover from a news perspective. You can show ads that are relevant. So I think that, you know, if you can imagine 20, 30% of the open web evolved, maybe 50%. evolve into conversational type of experience, the revenue upside is huge. So much more money can be made and advertisers will find so much value in the open web. So I think that's exciting. And we've always been very close with publishers, so we're lucky that we get to have those conversations. And it's now live on many great partners, Advanced Media, Sinclair, Huffington Post, many great partners globally.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

They're leveraging Deeper Dive on their sites. So talk to us about Deeper Dive specifically, because I think there's a lot of discussion out there in terms of all of my conversations might go through, let's call it Gemini, or might go through ChatGPT or might go through whatever Meta is doing with Hatch. But with Deeper Dive, if I understand this correct, well, help me understand A, Deeper Dive, and B, then all these publishers can be that engine, that conversation. But tell me more about Deeper Dive.

Adam Singolda, CEO

So Deeper Dive is the first in the world free LLM answer engine supported by ads for the open web. You can be anyone. If you work with Tabula, you can access Deeper Dive to make an answer engine Gemini-like on your homepage to go to usatoday.com. On the homepage, there is Ask Usatoday Anything. We're using our first-party data to also generate questions for you. So a lot of consumers don't even know what that answer engine means. So when you go to USA Today, if you're a Knicks fan, because you've been to ESPN, we may say a question. We'll say the Knicks season is about to start in October. Can we win again? And if I click on it, first of all, it's like, oh, that's so nice. You know me. And if I click on it, I enter Deeper Dive on USA Today. It looks like a Gemini answer AI mode. You get the short answer. You can say I like it or I didn't like it. You can follow up. And then DeeperDive says, by the way, while I have you, check out this video on your site today about the Knicks. Check out this article. Look at this point of view about why we won and why we may win again. And then I read it. And then the DeeperDive, again, this is not as you've read this article. How about this question? Or maybe you want to talk to me more. And that is a completely new experience. It's free, and it's generating revenue every single time someone is using that. The adoption rates, and you know the web really well run. I mean, if you look at companies over the last 20 years, click-through rates on things online, like what is the likelihood I would click on an ad? What's the likelihood I would click on an article? Tends to be half a percent to maybe 1%, 2%. DeeperDive is being used by more than 10% constantly. So it's a double-digit adoption, which is, I've never seen anything like that. And the CPM, like I mentioned, could be 5% to 10x. a single tiny ad is making such a great CPM which is also why I believe Google is not only they're not concerned about Bluelink search, I'm convinced they just want search as we know it now to die as fast as possible and all move to Gemini because they probably know what I know now which is ads on in conversations are worth a lot more than anything else so that's what it is now and then our obviously advertisers are excited to be part of LLM, and about a month ago or two, we got a lot of companies coming to us and saying, can you help us monetize our AI? Because we don't have your ads, and it's very expensive, and we kind of launched Deeper Dive Network. So if you have your own utility app, and you're making it, you have a commerce AI app that you raise money for from investors, and you want to make money, you can come to us, and we'll show ads on your own LLM. So that's new.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

And talk to us about the implementation. So how long does it take, did it take, or as an example, USA Today to install it? Because essentially what we're talking about is natural language search and conversational search across every single site that most every single company is trying to do. So talk to us about the implementation process. Maybe I'll back up. What gives Tabool the right to win here? Then talk about the implementation process. And then where are we on adoption rates of your customers?

Adam Singolda, CEO

So the implementation itself is fairly easy. What we want to take a bit more time is we're always installing kind of like a QA process, a human and machine. We have AI as a judge, agents that basically test the quality of those of your site. The students were happy with that. And then we have a human QA team that is just it's funny. it's like a whole new type of people that we've hired that are just news junkies and they're just talking to they just to see how it feels like yeah so we we test it out the editorial team is testing it out we're launching on five percent ten percent fifty percent a hundred percent so that part we want to take a bit more time because it's so new we want people to feel comfortable with the process so that is not complicated on the technical front and there's an emotional part to it and i'm not if you've ever driven a Tesla self-driving car. It's not about that. It's emotional. For the first time, either you're in the driving seat or you're next to it, you can believe that you're not touching the wheel. Maybe your kid is in the back. So I think there's a self-driving car element here where publishers are saying, oh my God, this thing is answering on our behalf. So it's a bit of that experience for the first time, but then you love it. And they love it a lot more once they see how valuable that is So that's fairly straightforward. Adoption rates. of publishers uh yeah of your publishers that are using so it's it's it's now been adopted by a few dozens of publishers okay and um and our also there's language barriers like we're launching it language by language um but it's it's it's a very fast growing part of our business still small in revenue um but we just are we're about 10 million so about 10 million people are using it so if you look at cloud open ai perplexity i think perplexity is about 30 million people so i want to be bigger than perplexity you know within a year or so in terms of adoption and if we get more and more publishers using it we just launched fox news which is amazing uh we have such an you know incredible partner list if we can get many of them to use deeper dive my goal is to become the top five kind of answer engine in the world and also help advertisers monetize that experience, much like Gemini, because OpenAI and Claude, I'm not sure will be as successful in ads, because I'm not sure Sam I'm not sure he's going to sleep and he's dreaming about CPM, I don't think so but Gemini would be very good at it, and I think we'll be very good at it, so I kind of want to be the second after Gemini in terms of LLA monetization Love it, there's a lot to go off here, but we have 11, 12 minutes left so let me get to Realize, which you mentioned earlier, maybe let's explain to the audience

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

like what is Realize but then also how is it accelerating or at least building the business here?

Adam Singolda, CEO

We launched Realize about a year and a half ago or earlier last year which was essentially a relaunch of our advertising platform which used to be a native ad platform. So native ads are a subset of the advertising market that we did a really good job growing that business from zero to almost $2 billion. And then we wanted to go after a bigger dream of basically monetizing the entire internet, not just a piece of it. We wanted on the advertising side that you can give us display ads, vertical ads, motion ads, whatever you have, give it to us. And we wanted to support all types of bidding strategies, much like a Google does. and that's meant to offer like a p-max completely autonomous opportunity or more controlled and you know different different strategies that are available to in a walled garden and then we also imagine that one day publishers will say we don't want you to just monetize the bottom of the article monetize everything just take everything and monetize it and just a month ago we announced so first of that's realized realizes our version of Google or meta ad engine we call it real life. And the goal of it is to offer you everything you're used to doing in a walled garden outside of the walls. It's like the walled garden outside of the walls.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

And all inventory. Or the inventory that's available that they let you have.

Adam Singolda, CEO

But the vision of that was we want to have access to everything on the inventory front and want to support all types of strategies and formats that advertisers are used to. Whether that's Argentic, which is fully autonomous, or with more control. and we're a year and a half into it. First of all, we're seeing accelerated growth rates for our business, which is great. We're generating a good amount of EBITDA, which is mostly converting to free cash fund. We're buying a lot of shares. We believe in the story. We support the story. And also we're seeing evidence from the market, which is the most important that it's working. A month ago, NBC, which is a very large media company, announced with us, it's my dinner today, that's a celebratory dinner. that all of NBC news and today.com to start will be monetized by Taboola. Which if you told me a few years ago that I'm going to have an opportunity to work with such an incredible partner and monetize everything, the only way to put an ad on that site if you're not buying directly from NBC, which of course they can always do, is through Taboola. Exclusive everything.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

So all first party, so is NBC doing any first party sales?

Adam Singolda, CEO

They can sell their own whatever they want always. But that's it. Once they're done selling, there's no more ad tech stack. There's no more, let me manage 10 SSPs, 10 DSPs. Those days are gone. One Google search, one Google Facebook, and hopefully one company that can help simplify this complicated ad tech space for publishers and for advertisers. And I just can't, that day is an amazing day. One, it's one partnership, but a really good one. And if you can do that, And I did say publicly that this will 3x the revenue, roughly, for us, which means that if we can get 30% of our company to do that, we've doubled the bullet. And so that is such a, I'm so excited to become the backbone for the internet as a vision to say, which is part of realize, which is your question, you know, give us whatever assets you have, because you're going to get stuck on Google at some point. You're going to get stuck on Facebook at some point and come to us after. And on the supply side, have access to everything, exclusive, beautiful, first-party performing engine across the web. So we did the first one, and I hope to be able to share more of that.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

Great. And then is Deeper Dive part of this partnership, or that comes later, potentially?

Adam Singolda, CEO

Later, potentially.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

Yeah. And talk to us a little bit about the supply side, so the advertisers that are on Taboola. I think you mentioned earlier about $100,000 spend, scaled advertiser was the comment. Talk about the supply side in terms of growth and just the demand, the demand of these advertisers for the inventory that you have.

Adam Singolda, CEO

So we have around 2,000 plus scaled advertisers. And generally, if we can, we prefer to have more advertisers, though we're always happy to see a big share of wallet from the same advertiser. but we like diversity. We like to see that number going up whenever we can. And I think advertisers are really fine comfort with our investment and roadmap as we have to realize and realize plus, which is our, like I mentioned, like our PMAX or Argentic. And they like to see the NBC News announcement was so well received by the advertising community because that's exactly what they want. They want to have flexibility to be anywhere on the page that makes sense for them as a brand and makes sense for them from a performance standpoint. On the supply side, you know, we're seeing a really interesting diversity of growth into different areas. You know, the Yahoo partnership, which is an incredible one, you know, we've announced, I think it's three years-ish now, give us access to different things like, you know, email page and, you know, other very U.S.-based, which we were very global. So that opened our eyes to email providers. You know, they need monetization and AI services too. And then with Taboola News, we're seeing it's one of our fastest growth of Taboola revenue-wide, and that's Taboola on OEM, on devices, such as Samsung, Xiaomi, and others. And that now makes you feel about mobile, just in general mobile, mobile apps, mobile devices, just all this mobile space. So that's an interesting kind of source of growth for us. And the product, which we talked about, as well as the full pay, this monetized everything. So we're seeing kind of growth in different directions. I would say on the negative side, we're seeing AI impacting negatively some publishers. So we are seeing search traffic going down. We're fortunate that most of our publishers are bigger publishers, so they have a lot of direct traffic. But the search traffic is being impacted by that.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

Impacted in that they're not getting the results from SEO?

Adam Singolda, CEO

They're not getting as much search traffic as they used to. So we're working with our publishers to help them navigate that, things like Deeper Dive, homepage personalization. These are all initiatives that are there to increase engagement and traffic. But I think that is some also negative that is going on. And I think that's an opportunity for companies to innovate and double down on partnerships. That's how we're seeing it.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

Maybe one last on the publisher partnerships. You know, we talked about NBC. Obviously, you mentioned Yahoo. That was a big deal a few years ago. NBC, Fox News, I think, is on there, too. Just launched. How do we leverage that to get more publishers onto the platform? or is that something we should be looking for? You know, every quarter more publishers can join, or we already have...

Adam Singolda, CEO

I mean, there's never enough.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

The correct answer.

Adam Singolda, CEO

Ron, there's never enough. I don't know if that was a rhetorical question, and you know I would say that. No, I think when I look at the future of supply, I'm seeing three types of supply growth. One, upsells from within the same publishers, like the NBC ones. I want to see 3X again and again and again whenever I can. we've done such a good job spending a decade building trust with those they know we love them so much and they love us back so that's one growth the second one is what we call liberation if you work with someone that's not tabula we hope to work with you one day and we offer you so much more than money so you would consider us deeper dive personalization integration on tabula news to get traffic just a variety of things and now full site monetization if that's what you want So, and Fox News is an amazing partner. I mean, I can't tell you how happy I am because one, they're great, but two, advertisers adore them. Like it's such an amazing engaged audience. So the second one is more of that type of win. And the third one is, I always call it like, what's the next Yahoo? Not from that necessarily structure of the deal, more about, I think there's so many other great, big, big size consumer companies that are thinking themselves, of how do we tap into performance advertising budgets and who is big enough to support us and who is not Google. And I think that's a very short list. We're not the only ones, obviously, but I think we're on that list. And I'm excited about talking to amazing companies that, again, I never thought were in my team that are in our team.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

So to that, actually, it's a good segue to, I believe the team, or you just hired a new chief business officer.

Adam Singolda, CEO

Yeah, Krishan.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

The first one that the company's had, if I'm not mistaken. So why now?

Adam Singolda, CEO

We've had SDP of revenue, but that's our first kind of like, you know.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

Chief level.

Adam Singolda, CEO

C-level person in the U.S. And that, and, you know, so I know Krishan for a decade from his days with Linda Carino at NBC. And, you know, the hardest job of a CEO and the hardest job of any company is building a culture that is a good one, that supports people executing and being happy and attracts other good people. So Krishan is such a vote of confidence coming from Amazon, coming from NBC, and he's awesome. He's been with us for six months now doing the work. So I'm very happy to have him on the team.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

Yeah, that's great. We have about two minutes left. I don't know if there's any questions in the audience. If not, think of a question and we can come back and keep going. Okay, we'll keep going here. um let's talk about the business and so more of the you know the profitability side i think you have a margin framework that you're that you're reaching towards uh in terms of growth just you know as the mix shifts away or tour i guess mix shifts towards display vertical video deeper dive you know just um full page monetization talk to us about that long-term view x-tac like how do you there's a lot going on here, Adam, that's pretty exciting.

Adam Singolda, CEO

Yeah. In general, so first, you know, we optimize for growth first. So we do want as management, we want to have our X-TAC, which is what's left for us after we share revenue with our partners, which is the most important number for us because we want to do good deals. We want that to be in the double digit. So we want to be first in double digit organically, consistently. So investors look at that and we can look at that and be happy with it. And then we always said that long-term, we want to be higher double-digit growth rates. But that's kind of like our main priority. From there, we have about 30% EBITDA margin, which we always, Steve, our CFO, always spoke about profitable growth. So we want to be a company that is not only able to grow faster, take advantage of our unique assets, data, AI, people, partners, all those things. We also want to generate a healthy EBITDA that can support us continue to investing in the business and growing even faster. And in times like that, even buying a lot of the shares and owning more of it, which is fantastic. And we convert 60%, 70% of EBITDA. So I would say our ex-tech margin tends to be between 35% to 40%, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, based on different things. But around that, and so I wouldn't be excited if it's 35%, I wouldn't be excited if it's 39%. It's in that range, and that's what we like to do. Of that, 30% converts to that EBITDA conversion. And from that, 65% is free cash flow, which right now, most of that is being used to buy shares. And it's great because we're able to develop a deeper dive and realize plus and full-size monetization and still buy so many shares. So I'm very proud of the team for being hardworking, executing, and slowly progressing us towards where we need to be. know where we want to be. We know where we are now.

Ron Josie, Analyst — Citi

Perfect. Well, Adam, I couldn't have ended in a better spot. That's a great way, an overview of the business, deeper dives, seeing greater adoption, more publishers joining the supply, Realize Plus automating the process and skilled advertisers. So thank you for the time today. I appreciate the time. Thanks for having me. Great. Thank you.