All right, we ready? Great. Hi everyone, thanks everyone for joining us today. As you know, we are here with the Taboola founder and CEO, Adam Singolda. So thanks, Adam, for joining us.
Thanks for having us.
It's an exciting first day of our 2024 TMT conference, and great to have you kinda closing up the day for us here today. So, where to start? You founded Taboola 17 years ago now?
Yeah, 2007.
2007, so 17 years ago, I guess. For those that might be a little less familiar, here, can you tell us a little bit about the journey and the problem that Taboola is solving today?
Sure. Thanks, thanks for having us. So, at a high level, we, we act as I started Taboola back then. It's my first job after spending almost seven years as an engineer in the army, as my accent strongly suggests, from the Holy Land, Israel. And so the reason I started Taboola was because I couldn't find anything to watch on TV, and I thought that, you know, people, all of us, should not be looking for TV shows, and TV shows should be looking for us. And there was this need for this recommendation engine that could travel around everything we do outside of walled garden, right? Like, if you go to Facebook, they have their own recommendation engine. If you go to Amazon, they serve you. People will buy this, also buy that.
But if you go anywhere else, any website, any app, any digital canvas outside of those walled gardens, there wasn't any similar AI that would say, "You might like," based on people like you and things like that. So the idea was to start a recommendation engine for the open web and serve this entire market. It's about $80 billion market. And what's interesting about it is that the biggest opportunity is the way the open web, which is websites like CNBC or NBC News or many apps we're on, the way that they're being monetized is using banners. And if you're thinking about banners and anyone in this audience, I mean, none of you remembers the last time you clicked on a banner, not accidentally, I mean. And that means that it's not really engaging user experience.
When we go to Instagram, they serve us this sponsored, beautiful post. When we go to Google Search, the search ads look the same. It's all native on Amazon. You buy one thing, they say, "You might wanna buy this." So everyone moved away from this traditional.
Display.
Display boxes. Meanwhile, in the Open Web, which was starting about 30 years ago, most of the $80 billion are these display ads. So the opportunity is to kind of imagine a redesigned internet that feels and looks and is relevant like Twitter or Snap or TikTok or Instagram, and grow that market and be the leading gateway for advertisers to reach the Open Web.
So bring that to life for us, if you could. So I'm on CNBC.com, or we'll get into the Yahoo product sample. I'm in Yahoo Finance. Bring it, bring to life how Taboola powers, from a, you know, an actual use case standpoint, recommendations and advertisements and, and how that all works.
Yeah, and I'm sure many, many of you are using us daily. So about 600 million people a day go to websites across the internet, from ESPN to CNBC to Yahoo Finance and, and any other site. And usually, the way it would be you would see us would be either at the end of the article. If you go to CNBC, it will say, "More from CNBC you might like." So this has us just been a recommendation engine for CNBC videos and content and more Squawk Box and more Cramer or whatever that is on CNBC we think you might like. We don't get paid for that. So this is one of our added value services to help users be engaged with the site, and the publisher appreciates that because we grow the pie. We make people excited to stick around and so forth.
We also do the same for the homepage. If you go to USA Today, the entire homepage is personalized using our AI, so it feels relevant for you versus like a static homepage. So that's the core service, which is being delivered at no cost, and we all use it all the time. And then, in between recommendations, you might see people who read this thing also wanna buy a piece of furniture from Wayfair. If you click on that, we take you to Wayfair, we get paid, and we share that with CNBC. This year, we'll generate about $2 billion of revenue from this type of advertising format.
How do you think about your, your secret sauce in terms of driving that personalization in a world where it isn't a walled garden, so people might not be logged in, and obviously, in a world where cookies are deprecating, how does this work today?
I like it. I like to tell you why I like it. First of all, I think its privacy is a good trend. I mean, it's kind of, you know, it's freaking out to see ads that follow you. You know, you bought a shoe once, and now everything looks like that shoe. It's not fun. So, as a consumer, I kinda like privacy trends. I like cookies going away. I think the world needs to be relevant but safe, you know? So, I like this trend. And I also think that, if I compare Taboola to Facebook, we use Facebook all the time. We're logged in. But would you ever share with Facebook something that is really important to you or personal? As an example, I have three kids.
If my daughter doesn't feel well, and I'm curious about what people might have, you know, give me feedback about that, I would never put it on Facebook and say, "Hey, my daughter has this. What do you think?" but I will read about it a lot, right? Like, I'm gonna be up at night reading about it on the weekend. I'm gonna get really curious about something. And the same about maybe my passion project. I might really like, I don't know, certain shows, but it's embarrassing to put it on Twitter. But I read about it, and I follow it. And so there're just a lot of things I care about, I'm curious about, but I would never share those with others.
This is the fundamental difference between social networks, which is kind of the identity I wish people thought of me, versus the open web, which is the things I truly care about because it's just me and the internet. This is where Taboola sees you. I kinda think of Taboola as this curiosity graph that allows us to see the context of what you're doing right now as a proxy for who you are versus what you would have told me about yourself had I asked you. I think this is a great, it's a good thing for users, and it's great for advertisers because they don't have to target demographics and things of that nature. They have to target things that are relevant in the context of which market I'm in right now.
If I'm reading about furniture, I might be in market to buy it. If I'm reading about real estate, I might be in market to move. And we have almost 20,000 advertisers who work with us direct who rely on us to deliver this consistent performance in the Open Web. And I think the Open Web can play an important part, especially in today's world. I mean, you know, we want our children to live in a world where they can make decisions based on editorial content, human-driven content, versus, you know, social networks, which in many ways have some tax we pay for, and we're seeing it in the world today, you know? It's, it's, it has a it's a bit dangerous too. So I believe in the Open Web and journalism, and Taboola is kinda like the Robin Hood for that market.
So, contextualized content that you have code on the page to either read or get what the context is, and then you can power the recommendations from that.
Right. Use context, as the strongest signal for what I might be interested in and compare me to people like me that were in that context. But you may know nothing about me. Like, you may not know my gender or my age, and that's perfectly fine, because you can still drive and by the way, if you look at even Google, how they started with so much contextual advertising with AdSense and so forth. So we know it's very good, and we know the market is big. Now the question is, can you redesign the experience so it feels like people expect from social networks with banners moving to more native, and can you become the first must-buy advertising company, in the Open Web? And that's kind of, our mission.
AI, big theme. It will be a big theme around the advertising market. Yeah. How does Taboola think about AI opportunity today and over time?
The first of all, I think it's really for investors to know, it's AI in general is a really like, we all say AI all the time, but it's really hard. I mean, there's a huge difference between machine learning, ML, deep learning, DL, and bullshit, BS, right? And very rarely, actually, if you look at companies around the world, have you seen companies that have a lot of engineering experience and data to truly do deep learning at the level we all expect? You know, what we're seeing now from GenAI or when you go to Amazon, it makes so much sense to you. That's really hard to do. And, you know, we're very proud of our investment in AI.
I think today, the biggest achievement we've had to date is people engage and discover something on Taboola, like an article or a video or a product, high tens of billions of times a year. So we, you know, we interact with 600 million people a day, and they discover so much on Taboola. And that's something that we've been working on for a decade. On the advertising side, I'm gonna get a little bit of technical here. When you buy from Facebook and Google, you don't have to tell Facebook and Google what is your CPM or what is your CPC. I don't know. In this audience, who knows what CPM is? Raise your hand if you know it. Yeah, that there's a reason why I mean, you shouldn't know what CPM is.
Because, because if you walk into any business and you ask them, "What is your business metrics?" If you walk into a flower shop and you ask the owner, "Tell me, what's the value of someone coming into your store and buying flowers?" Zero flower shops will say, "Well, CPM is $15." It will never happen. What they know is that a client is worth $30 in because that's how much they sell a bouquet. If you walk into any store, they usually have an opinion about what is the value of a client. None of them has ever said, "Well, CPC should be $0.30." This was invented in AdTech. It was invented in this industry of many, many small companies that did not have the AI of Facebook and Amazon and Google. When you work with Google and Amazon, they never ask you that question.
You're a flower shop. You go to Facebook, and you say, "I have a $5,000 budget. Go and get me clients 'cause I wanna sell flowers." And they do it. We started investing in deep learning about seven years ago. And I'm proud to say that, as of our last update, about 50% of our revenue, which this year is approaching $2 billion, is gonna be using similar AI. We don't you don't have to tell us anything. You just tell us what's your budget, your goal, and we do it for you. By the end of the year, I suspect this will be the vast majority of our revenue, which is amazing. And two, we've incorporated GenAI into our advertising console.
So if you're an advertiser and you don't have a creative agency, we'll help you come up with titles and thumbnails and soon maybe even landing pages. So not only do you have to not tell us your CPC or CPM, you don't tell us anything. You just say, "I wanna sell flowers. Come up with titles, come up with thumbnails, generate my page, and get me flower clients." And this is where it's going over the next few years, which is amazing for businesses, and a good opportunity for companies that have data and scale like us.
You mentioned a lot of small companies. I think the ad tech sector has a reputation for being confusing with too many companies out there doing similar things. You just mentioned also about being sort of a, a one-stop shop for advertisers. Who do you serve today? Who, like, who are Taboola clients? Are they the advertisers? And how do you think about your platform serving both publishers and, and advertisers? And, and what and where is the world going?
So, I think in open, there were two challenges in open historically, which I think Taboola overcame with the way we do business. The first one is that, to my knowledge, open companies don't have exclusive long-term relationships with publishers. They bid on inventory, which means they may see it today on the website, but they may not see it tomorrow if they don't win an auction. So they participate in this waterfall and auction that they don't really have consumers they know are theirs. Why do we love Facebook so much? Because we know Facebook has 2 billion people logging in every day. They're not going anywhere. And if they go, they're not running out. So Facebook can focus on improving ARPU and growing the business. In open, in open web, it was never the dynamics.
It was always this auction, and, and it was exposure in that place. With us, all of our publishers are ours for the next 3, 5, with Yahoo, 30 years. So we have this predictable user base, that allows us give us the license to improve ARPU against those users. That's one thing. The second thing is, historically, in AdTech, most companies didn't have direct-to-client relationships. They worked with programmatic companies and agencies and things. For us, 90% of our revenue is direct. It's our client. They buy from Taboola. It was in our technology. They have pixels on their page, which allows us to optimize the performance for them.
So between those two things, we look like a walled garden but in the open web, which is the right dynamics, I think, for, you know, obviously, shareholders because it's more predictable, but also for us because we can grow the company to the size and scale that we want. To the second part of your question, our clients are mostly performance advertisers. So it's a very resilient type of business because they work with us because it works versus wine and dine type of business. They're mostly mid-funnel. So think of Wayfair trying to get someone to sign up to a newsletter, or try someone to subscribe to something. So it's not necessarily immediate action. And then a growing piece of our business is e-commerce, which is more immediate action. That's about 20%. So that's, kinda the mix of revenue.
And then with Yahoo now coming on board, we're seeing new types of clients, which is more the Verizons and Hulus and top of the market that are spending with us.
Is the world, you know, historically split between brand and performance? Is the world, like, retail media and all these other networks emerge, and digital advertising evolves with AI? Is the world going towards performance, and therefore, is the world coming to you?
I think the world was always in per se, so no one built a multibillion-dollar company relying on brand advertising solely. It was always the cherry. It was always the bonus. If you look at Google, Facebook, Amazon, even Snap and Twitter, Pinterest, they're mostly performance advertising, 90%, 80%. So it was always the case. I think right now, more than ever, after, you know, 2022 and just realizing that we need such strong evidence that things are working to justify the budget, it goes even to more extreme that you're seeing big brands, wanting some sort of, you know, brandformance of sort. Even if they wanna advertise for their brand, they want some metric that justifies doing it again. So I think, you know, from 2022 moving forward, my assumption is you're only gonna grow your company if you can create true value for your clients.
There's no more free money, if you will. Like, we've had a great ride, you know, leading into the end of 2021. Money just came in, not necessarily because we all deserved it. Those days are gone. And I think right now, you either deliver the goods, and you're awesome, or over time, you're going away.
Yeah. Transitioning maybe to the recent performance. You guys reported earnings last week. Great momentum this latter half of 2023.
Thanks.
How would you sum up 2023 in terms of your performance and the setup heading into 2024?
I'm very, very proud of us. I mean, it was obviously, again, on the back of 2022, we've had a lot of work. We just keeping our business executing. We signed Yahoo. Then leading into Q4, we finished with a bang, kind of announcing in this earning, we announced Yahoo being on track. So for those who may not know, we signed a 30-year deal with Yahoo that allows us to exclusively monetize Yahoo as a property, including migrating Yahoo advertisers into Taboola, including connecting the pipes so we can have even more contextual segments. It's a big one. Yahoo and Apollo, these are great folks. Like, we're very proud to be on the same team.
So that's been you know, we predicted a year a year plus ago, we told our investors, "2024 will be over $200 million of Adjusted EBITDA," which is twice as much as last year. And we told the investors, "It's gonna be over $100 million of free cash flow," which is twice as much as last year. Very proud of, you know, Taboola's team during this time in the world working towards that goal. And we just reiterated that 2024 is a is a record year across everything, top-line growth of 33%, ex-TAC growth of 25%. And then we just also announced Apple signing with Taboola. So Yahoo was kind of a first of its kind because there weren't many billion-dollar-a-year deals up until that moment when we worked with Yahoo.
Many investors asked us, "Well, if Yahoo chose Taboola, who is the next Yahoo?" We said, "Well, now, there's an opportunity for Taboola to kinda be this advertising in a box to empower many, many partners like Yahoo." We just announced that Apple News, if you have an iPhone and you swipe right, you see Apple News on your device. Between the news, and as you read content, there's an ad placement which we will power. That was a, you know, huge vote of confidence, to have Apple choose Taboola for a quality perspective, and there's just more reach for advertisers. I'm, I'm fairly happy coming into 2024.
That's great. And on the Yahoo partnership, they had some of their own ad properties. How did they think about signing that long contract with you and that long-term partnership? Like, what's in it for them in terms of differentiation or increased growth or more ads, more ad dollars on their properties? And ultimately, like, why Taboola.
First of all, you should know I wanted a 50-year deal. And, you know, I compromised for 30 because I thought that's a good middle ground. But, you know, also renewing this deal in my 70s would be awesome. So never but anyway, let's go back to your question. So, I knew Jim Lanzone. He was the CEO of Yahoo 'cause he was the CEO of CBSi. And we had this, we knew each other. He signed a deal with Taboola back then, 7 years ago. So we had this, you know, some relationship and trust between us. And, you know, I think that matters, at least from an introduction point of view into the process. And for them, I think the opportunity was to work with someone that can grow the pie and makes it even stronger than it already was.
For us, it was an opportunity to work together to get closer to the becoming this must-buy. And, it's definitely a time zone thing. I'm supposed to wake up too. So nevertheless, this was an opportunity to kind of like, you know, have synergies, from product innovation perspective, but then build a roadmap together around more formats, e-commerce, coming to markets with new opportunities. And what's nice about it is it's all of our dreams coming into that deal are taking place. We're announcing that advertisers - and I mentioned some of them - that used to buy Yahoo using Yahoo's technology have migrated to buy Yahoo through Taboola. So it's the same Yahoo, just different way in. And they're seeing amazing results.
They're either getting more volume, so they're getting more clients for the same budget, or they're getting the same amount of clients, but they pay less per client. So it's already kind of evident in the technology that all of our dreams back then. We said, "Well, we should do the deal because the technology can improve performance for clients, and we can make everyone get the benefits from the synergies." It's coming to play. We're seeing that right now. And I'm excited about you know, it's interesting because I've been doing this for over a decade, and we've never had those types of clients. You know, we had mostly mid-funnel clients. And now, we're seeing these amazing names coming in, strong, and they're transitioning, and they're very happy. So to me, that just opens up.
Then, with Apple coming in, it continues to push Taboola kind of up-funnel as a premium place to you for you to work with.
Yeah.
So that's truly a whole new world for us.
Is that both Yahoo and Apple in terms of driving the diff like these new categories of advertisers?
I mean, I think so. I think Yahoo already has those clients, right? And, and then we're gonna open it up. So if you think about synergies, we said Q3, we, aimed to migrate to finish migration of those clients just on the Yahoo side. And then we're gonna open it up to the rest of the network so they can start buying Disney and, and NBC and CBS and all of Taboola's great publishers. So that, that is that is an upside opportunity. And with Apple, it kind of says, "Well, maybe more premium advertisers should, try this out. Google has 10 million clients. We have 15-20 thousand. So I do wanna have more advertisers working with Taboola. And ideally, some of these great names can spend more with us.
Is that across your publisher partners as well?
Not yet. It will be. Steve is very excited about this one, our CFO. He keeps saying that he's most excited about opening up Taboola's network to Yahoo's advertisers and specifically these type of advertisers.
Mm-hmm.
'Cause we've never had it before. We're big enough, right? Like, Taboola, we reach more people than Snap. We reach more people than Twitter. We have such a huge reach. There was no reason why we should've doubled our kind of ARPU and doubled the company with more clients and continued to invest in AI. And this is why it's the number one investment as a company that we have.
So you've talked about, obviously, a very robust outlook for this year. When you think about and you talked about 2021 and then the doldrums of, of 2022. When you think about the macro picture as we enter 2024 and that impact on just overall ad spend and then, as we head into 2025, you know, how do you how do you see the environment out there in terms of spend? Is there a difference between sort of past cycles? Like, how do you think about the overall backdrop?
So our working assumption, which is embedded in the guidance, is that the world stays somewhat flat to us, which means, you know, obviously, there's an election, and there are good things that take place this year, potentially. Those are upsides. We assume that the privacy and the cookie deprecation is a potential upside for us because if you look back in 2020 when Apple deprecated cookies, it created an increase in our yield, accelerated faster on Safari while other companies were struggling. Some budgets came to us. We don't assume that in our guidance, but it could happen. So our working assumption is that the world is flat to us. If we get some of those benefits, we'll take them.
And then on top of that, we have an assumption that we can improve yield because of our AI adoption, our max conversion adoption, which we mentioned. The 50% adoption of AI is the fastest adopted product since the beginning of Taboola. So we believe this will continue throughout the year and which will create benefits for our yield. So and I also think going back to what you said earlier about 2021 and 2022, I will never be, you know, assuming that things are just coming to us. But I, I believe that we will create our own luck by bringing a lot of goodness to Taboola because we invest in technology that people want. So from that perspective, we assume the world is flat, and we can make it better by getting clients to use our technologies.
When you think about the growth opportunities, steady-state growth opportunity being defined as user growth and growth in yield, how do you think about that dynamic this year and over time?
I think we can so from the yield perspective. I think we can double and triple the yield over time and then help maybe define yield, so for.
So to put it simply, Taboola reaches about 600 million people a day and will generate about $2 billion in revenue this year, so about $3.5 or so per user. So as of now, in 2024, Taboola will generate about $3.5 a user in 2024. Facebook generates about $200 a user. Snapchat generates about $33 or $3.5. So and we think we can double or triple that with our own line-of-sight AI and line-of-sight more clients to buy from Taboola. So when we think about Taboola as a business, we want more people. I mentioned 600 million. We want that to grow to 700 million, 800 million, and 1 billion people a day. And I want the $3.5 to go to $4, $5, $6 and more. So these are that's how we grow revenue as a company.
The yield front is our number one investment because we think there's so much opportunity for us to make it bigger from $3.5- $7 or $10 over time. On the so on the reach consumer side, we obviously wanna get more. Apple is another way for us to reach consumers. We have a whole OEM business called Taboola News where we basically pre-install news feeds on Xiaomi and Samsung and Oppo and many Android devices who don't have news like Apple News. So we basically we as we think about users, we're thinking, "Where else do people interact with anything digital?" You have the browser. You have apps, but then you have devices, speakers. Maybe Taboola should be integrated in your car, giving a use you may like. Eventually, I think Taboola could be and because we have such amazing articles, videos, audios.
We have it all. We have license to distribute that wherever people are. So we wanna be over time taking our publisher's content and recommendation to even beyond just the browser. Last year, we did report that Taboola News, which is the Android pre-installed news feed, crossed $100 million in 2023, which is a business we built internally. It's a startup within Taboola. So that business, investors love it. We love it because it's diversity to our business, and it drives traffic to our publishers. So, that's another way for us to reach consumers. Exciting. You guys are expecting a pretty big ramp in EBITDA this year from 18%. Last year, 30-ish% expected this year. What are the main drivers of the margin expansion?
Well, last year was, first of all, it is a record year for us. $200 million is a record year dollar-wise. 30% is kind of back to normal for us 'cause we used to be on 30% EBITDA margin. 2022 was a special year because it was an investment year. As we signed Yahoo, there was a lot of things to build and on board as part of this partnership. So we did kind of acknowledge 2022 being an investment year and 2020 2023, I mean, and 2024 being back to normal. So it is kind of our desired margin. We always say we want to we're thinking about our business as we have gross revenue. Ex-TAC should be 35%-40%, or more over time, but we're comfortable in that range.
We wanna convert 30% EBITDA from ex-TAC, and we want to convert 50% free cash flow from EBITDA. That's kind of our profile, which we wanna keep for a long time. So this year, we're coming back to it. And the main difference is, one, yield is growing, which helps. Yahoo is ramping versus last year, which was an investment year, which helps. And we're seeing this diversity. E-commerce is great by 20% of our ex-TAC. Taboola News, the OEM business, is growing. So we have this diversity in our business that also kind of contributes to the bottom line.
That's great. I have one more question, and we'll take some questions from the room. So you talked about being a must-buy for the open web. Can you tell us about what that means and what advantage did you guys have to, to unlock that must-buy? And then you guys are already $2 billion-ish of revenue. How do you think about the, the opportunities that going forward? 'Cause you're already, obviously, a very big business in and around open web advertising. So how do you think about that?
I think gross revenue, like, spend is the main proxy for must-buy because from the client point of view, you are a must-buy if you're big enough to worth their time. Think about EdTech. I mean, there's so many smaller companies. It's hard to convince advertisers to work with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and then there's so many of them that they can work with. So the gross revenue and the spend is kind of like the main proxy, I think, for a must-buy. So if you think about the big platforms, obviously, very large, and then you have this from The Trade Desk to Snap to what is Pinterest this year?
With, size-wise?
Pinterest, yeah, revenue-wise. I don't know. Yeah. I think it's maybe, maybe 3 or so. And then you have Twitter too and Outbrain too. So you have between $2 billion-$6 billion, you have us. And then you have $1 billion below, kind of, 50 companies. So I think the chance, the opportunity for us is to consolidate that fragmentation into a bigger gateway and get more, you know, go up the food chain into $3 billion, $4 billion, and more because so I think now, we're at the beginning of our must-buy. Like, we're, we're creeping in to say, "Where is the Twitter size? You buy from X or buy from Taboola. It's the same size." We reach about the same amount of people, just different placements. So I think that's the best proxy. The second thing is how easy it is for clients to work with you.
So I'm thinking about churn rates and NDRs. If they buy from you and it's most people succeed, it you know, you have AI helping them to buy from you. You don't ask them for CPC and CPM, all those things. I think that's another element. By the end of the year, I expect most of our business to be like that. So I think the second thing is just making it very easy for advertisers to buy, versus how it is today.
Is there an element of, I mean, we're kind of saying upside or upsell and cross-sell a bunch of new services and solutions? Are there different formats that you're gonna continue to develop?
Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I mean, if you buy from us if Wayfair used to buy from us, subscription to their newsletter, well, now, they can buy commerce. They can say, "Well, we'll have this campaign with Taboola to buy subscription. But now, Taboola has 20% e-commerce. We should also, you know, sell tables and cups and things through Taboola as well." And then as we get to work with the Verizons and Hulus of the world, we can offer enterprise solutions. And they're also looking for different formats, which we're learning from Yahoo a lot. They've done a lot of good things. If you go to the homepage of Yahoo, which many of us go to daily for finance at least, you see the ads are beautiful. They're isolated. They're always, they feel premium.
So we're learning a lot about how you can do business with different types of clients and kind of diversify your client base in that way. But by far, I think the beginning is the size of the business. The second thing is the technology and how easy it is to work with you. And thirdly is the mix of revenue, like you say, so that it's worth their time.
Mm-hmm.
They can do a bunch of things with you.
Right. Great. Why don't I open it up to the floor? Any questions for Adam?
Hi. Thanks. Sorry. I'm pretty new to the company. Sorry if the question sounds pretty basic. Like, for partners like Yahoo, like, how are you going to convince them that they have better use for their inventory working with you rather than going to header bidding? Because I know, like, header bidding is, like, most price discovery, like, process.
Yeah. So in our world, header bidding is less of a, it's more relevant for display advertising. And the fundamental difference is that when you don't have a lot of direct demand, then everyone is bidding against each other. When you have a lot of direct demand, there's a foundational yield that creates a strong floor. And then programmatic can just make it a bit better. So in our space, because most of our demand is direct, we're able to generate a very high yield to begin with. And then we open it up for The Trade Desk. So we work with programmatic companies, The Trade Desk and DV 360 and Amazon and Magnite, PubMatic. We work with they're all great friends of ours. But effectively, they're able to win Taboola's own advertiser base about 10% of the time.
So in our space, for Taboola at least, we were able to build such a huge direct demand, which is very similar to, like, what Google does. If you look at Google display business, why is Google's SSP so strong? Most of it, they're using their own clients from search, which creates such a high floor. And then they're saying, "Well, other companies can bid on us and see if they can do better, like DV 360 and others." So only a few companies were able to do it up until now. And we were lucky that we worked very hard, in building a business that is mostly direct. So when Yahoo looked at us, they said, "Well, if we bring Taboola in, they're gonna create a floor that's already high because of their direct advertisers and their AI.
And then we'll see if anyone can do better." We're not opposed to anyone taking our own advertisers if they can do better than us. But effectively, it happens about 10% of the time. So that was one big kind of advantage too. I think Yahoo wanted someone who was big enough to rely on them 'cause Yahoo had a billion-dollar business. And they wanted someone that was more than that so they can rely on, you know, on them to take over such a big portion of inventory. And there aren't many options out there that can do it unless it's, you know, Google, Facebook can sell. But I mean, I think, in general, publishers are happy to diversify outside of Google when they can. And we're kind of this independent Switzerland, multibillion-dollar company that's not Google, not Facebook.
We will never fight with publishers 'cause we don't have a consumer business. Google, Facebook, and Amazon, they always have this identity crisis because, "Should Facebook keep you on Facebook, or should they send you to the publisher? Should Google keep you on Google Search page, or should they send you to the site?" We don't have this crisis. I think publishers appreciate the diversity with us. Specifically, we were unique in offering a high floor to begin with because of the amount of clients we have. It was a great question.
Any other questions? Maybe last one, Adam. We talked a little bit about the fragmentation across the universe, and ecosystem. How does Taboola think about M&A strategy?
M&A? You know, realistically, I think for us we have so much going on right now between Yahoo and, you know, and Apple ramping up and our own internal AI investment. I think we expect at least 2024 and 2025 to have outsized growth for the company. So it would take a lot to distract us, you know, kind of like from that momentum that we have. So we might have talk-ins if we see them. But, you know, I never say never. You know, if you call me, Rob, and tell me, "Adam, I need a meeting," we shall take that meeting. However, you know, I think realistically, you know, we wanna be laying low, execute, you know, lay low, do the work, and create, you know, that multiple we, I believe, we deserve and, you know, appreciation we can capture.
And then, you know, on the other side of it, who knows?
Yeah. Understood. Great. Thank you, Adam.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks, everyone.