Okay.
Yep.
All right. Good morning, everyone. My name is Brandon Feil. I lead our digital advertising investment banking practice at Morgan Stanley. I'm joined here today by Steve Walker, CFO of Taboola. Good morning, Steve.
Good morning. Thanks for having us.
Of course. Before we begin, maybe just a quick intro on who Taboola is, what do you do, and who do you serve?
Sure. Taboola is a performance advertising platform. We help businesses grow by placing their ads across the open internet, which for us means publisher websites, apps, even OEM cell phones through our OEM relationships. Obviously, our goal is to drive great performance for them, great outcomes, low cost per acquisition, whatever their goals are. We want to meet those. Our real advantage in doing that is our unique data. The way we collect that data, or where we get that data, is we have very tight relationships with 11,000 publishers globally. We're integrated on their sites. We help them grow their businesses by providing tools to customize their site, recommend content on their site, and provide monetization.
Likewise, we have direct relationships with thousands of advertisers who allow us to pixel their pages so we know when a conversion happens, so we know exactly when someone has bought something, signed up for a service, given them an email address, whatever their goal is. What all that does is it allows us to see what 600 million consumers are doing every day, what articles they're reading, what they're clicking on, what they're showing interest in, and even what they're buying, which is a huge advantage when it comes back to then placing the right ad in front of the right consumer at the right time. That is our kind of unique advantage.
Great. It is clear that you certainly do a lot for your advertising and publishing partners, respectively. Maybe just a little bit on how you got here today, a little on the story arc.
Sure. So basically, the business that we got into, what gave us a think of it as a land and expand, our beachhead was what a lot of people would call the recommendation space now. So that's where you work with a publisher. You're at the bottom of their article. You recommend content from their own site that tries to keep the consumer engaged. And then you also place sponsored content, so ads, native ads that you want the consumers to click on. That's how we got into the space. We pretty much won that space. Now kind of our next leg of our journey is to expand into an adjacent space, which is basically doing performance advertising everywhere, not just those native spots and not just native formats, but everywhere else on the open web.
Okay. Great. Now, you recently reported Q4 earnings as well as for the full year. Strong year. We'll just rattle off a few stats. Your ex-TAC gross profit, basically your top line, grew 25%, adjusted EBITDA $200 million. You delivered $150 million or so of free cash flow. I mean, these are really strong results for the year 2024. What do you think drove such strong results?
Yeah. Yeah. We were happy with the results last year. That was a record year for us on pretty much all of those metrics. We were really proud because we were able to meet basically targets that we set for ourselves almost two years earlier when we were announcing the Yahoo deal and explaining what was going to happen. That was great to kind of meet those goals. In terms of what drove it, it was a combination of factors, as is always the case. Our enterprise advertising business grew a lot last year. We talked throughout the year about how we were bringing on bigger advertiser partners than we ever have: Hulu, Samsung, Verizons of the world, which was great to see.
Yahoo is obviously a big part of that, both in terms of helping bring some of those advertiser relationships and also providing a huge amount of really high-quality supply. Our e-commerce business had a really strong growth year. Frankly, just our investment in AI and everything helped us to drive a lot of that performance.
Amazing. You've mentioned Yahoo a couple of times now. Maybe just for the audience, a little bit more detail on how that relationship came to be and kind of how it's working for you today.
Sure. We signed up Yahoo about two years ago. Basically, we're their exclusive native advertising partner. That is all of the ads on their site. If you look at a stream of content and they're recommending different things that you might want to read, about every third or fifth unit will be a paid unit. That's us. We're their exclusive partner for that. The way it came about, frankly, is they used to have a business called Yahoo Gemini, which was effectively a competitor of ours, but had come to the point where it was mostly servicing their owned and operated sites. I think as Apollo bought Yahoo out of Verizon, they were looking at really focusing the business on what they were really good at, the consumer products. They wanted to effectively outsource that business, which they did to us then.
Okay. Great. It sounds like the partnership's going well. I guess, how would you rate the partnership as of today? Kind of where do you see it going from here?
Yeah. I think the initial phase, we talked about three phases of this partnership back when. Phase one was going to be just getting their supply set up on our platform and transferring their advertisers to our platform. That's done. That went well. We did it on time. We are getting hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue from that now, so that went well. Phase two we talked about was going to be getting their advertisers that we brought over to spend on the rest of our network. Phase three was going out and getting even more budgets from similar types of advertisers to grow yield across our whole network. Frankly, phase two we're behind on. In fact, our guide for this year is lower than I would have expected, mostly because of that.
That phase was getting those big advertisers, the Hulus and Verizons of the world, to spend on the rest of our network. What we learned is that, in fact, they told us, "We love the performance you're driving for us on Yahoo. Everything's going well there, but we don't want to be in your feed," which is where most of our ad placements are. The other thing we learned is, as we started working on other advertisers like them, is there's big advertisers like Hulu works with us. You talk to somebody like a Netflix. It wasn't necessarily the exact conversation we had, but somebody like that. We also learned that those guys oftentimes say, "Native is kind of a niche format.
It's not something we want to spend the time learning. We're a little bit behind on that phase two, phase three of expansion with Yahoo, which frankly is why one of the reasons that we are fortunate to have already started working on Realize, which is our new ad platform, which we think will help us break through some of those objections.
Got it. Now, I guess you've alluded to it now: strong results in 2024, maybe slightly more conservative guidance in 2025. I think you, along with a lot of the rest of the sector, have seen some pressure in the stock. I guess, how do you think about 2025 and the lower guidance that you've provided in the context of rolling out Realize and some of the other tailwinds in the business?
Right. Basically, that guidance is we tried to de-risk it as much as possible because we kind of want to give our teams the space to get Realize, get some traction with the new product, and start to see those results before we build it in. That guide was basically the growth of our business organically as is, without impact from Realize or other new initiatives. We hope that is de-risked as much as possible. I think the way to think about it is our native space is growing relatively slowly. Where we need to grow now is by basically being able to get budgets that up until now were not available to us, which is think of display budgets. If we are talking to Netflix and they say, "I do not want to learn native," now with the release of Realize, we can say, "Great.
Give us your display campaigns. Give us your social campaigns that are working for you. Give us whatever is working, and we'll help place those ads across the open internet with the same technology that's driving the great performance on native, and importantly, the same data advantage that we have on our native. We'll only bid on ad spots and try and place those ads in places where we have that data advantage. Publisher sites that we work with or other partners that are giving us a tight data integration. We think that'll allow us to then get budgets that we don't have today and will help us grow at a much faster pace by moving into kind of these adjacent markets.
Got it. I think you're touching on this new product release, Realize, which came to market last week, which sounds super exciting. It's so exciting that I think Adam even referred to it as kind of Taboola's Amazon moment. Can you just unpack that a little bit for us?
I can't quite do it like Adam would do it, of course, but yeah. I think what we find exciting about this, and it's funny, Adam likes to say, "Yeah, it's our Amazon moment," like when Amazon went from books to everything, or he oftentimes says, "This is going to be like we're back in 2012, new growth." What's exciting about it to us is we've built about a $2 billion business in a market that, as we really took a look at it and really understood what these advertisers were telling us, we realized is about a $3billion to $4 billion market. We basically dominated that market, but we're just not going to be able to grow at the pace we want to in a market that's growing single digits that is that. Now, historically, we thought, "Okay, what's our next growth initiative?
Our next growth will be getting those native ads to take over display. What we realized from talking to the advertisers is that's not the way it's going to work. They don't want to learn native. They don't want to learn how it's going to work, even if it's a great ad format. Now what we're excited about is we won't do that. We'll work with them the way they want to work. You want to work with display? Great. You want to work with those social ads that are working well on Meta? Great. Give us what's working, and we'll help you figure out how to place those on the open internet, which, from talking to consumers, is something that they want because they, A, are overly dependent on Google in many cases.
B, there's diminishing returns happening with Meta right now, so they can't really spend more with Meta without kind of killing their returns on ad spend. There's no good other way to buy across the open internet. We're excited because we think this is something that nobody else is offering that's going to take our kind of TAM from $3 billion to $4 billion to, we estimate, $55 billion. It's just a whole new space to play in that we think can help us grow at the pace we expect of ourselves.
Awesome. You have now mentioned Google, Meta. This is a new TAM for you. You kind of own content rec and native. Very naturally, you are going to come across some new competitors. Who do you think those competitors are?
Yeah. I think our biggest competitors now is anyone who's trying to help performance advertisers to spend on the open internet. That could be the lowest hanging fruit here is other ad tech players who are probably using their standard DSP tools or their SSP tools, depending on who they are, to try and help somebody like a Hulu get performance on the open internet. That is, we think that's a big market. We think we can more than double our company just by taking those budgets from those other ad tech players. I do think over time, also, there's an opportunity to win budgets from the bigger walled gardens too because there are diminishing returns at Meta. Frankly, Google doesn't provide the level of transparency that advertisers want.
I think there's enough frustration there that if, at the end of the day, we can just show performance, we can win budgets. I think I would think of it as, right now, the ad tech players, other ad tech players who are trying to do performance but are not performance specialists like us, followed by the bigger walled gardens winning incremental budgets there.
Interesting. When you think about the problems that you're solving for your advertising customers and publishing partners, respectively, can you unpack some of those problems that you're solving and why Taboola's approach is different than some of those competitors?
Yeah. I think I'll start on the publisher side because I think our approach there is very unique relative to anybody else in the ad tech space. For publishers, we view it as our job is to help them grow their business. We provide tools that include editorial tools that will tell them, "What are your readers reading on your site elsewhere on the internet? What topics are trending? What's hitting social right now that seems to be getting buzz?" We give them all this data that we have because we have a broad view of things to help them basically do better with their editorial staffs. What should we be writing about? What should we be promoting? How do we grow our business that way?
We also give on-site tools like a homepage personalization tool as well as recommendation, the ability to recommend content that helps engage with their consumers, keep them on site longer. In fact, we even drive traffic to them through our product we have called Taboola News, where we are basically providing Apple News but for Android devices. We have a global integration with Xiaomi. We're in certain markets with Samsung. We have a global integration with Oppo and others. Generally, what that does is allows us to recommend our own partners' news content on mobile phones and drive traffic to them. Basically, for publishers, we're doing everything we can to help them grow their business, including bringing revenue, but also doing a lot more. That's very unique. No SSP does that for a publisher.
On the advertiser side, I think what is most unique is we're a performance specialist with a very unique set of data. No SSP or DSP or any other ad tech player has the 600 million consumers knowing what they're reading, what they're clicking on, what they're buying downstream that we do. That kind of unique data really helps us be able to sell the advertisers on or give the advertisers performance that they just can't get elsewhere. By being a performance specialist and not trying to also do branding and also do this, it's a focused approach, and they know what they're going to get from us.
Right. So very advanced targeting. What about in terms of measurement and attribution from the driving performance and proving it out perspective?
Yeah. That's, I think, one thing that we find that is a differentiator versus, say, a Google, a PMAX at Google. We give full visibility. We'll tell you, "Here's how you're doing on CNBC. Here's how you're doing on ESPN. Here's how you're doing on USA Today." If at the end of the day, they say, "That ESPN audience is just not working for me," we give them the ability to say, "Less of that, more of this other." We give them a lot of good visibility into where things are working, where it's not, and then we work with them on improving it over time. Having said that, the other thing that our advertisers like is it's fairly automated. We work with them like Meta or like Google does, which is come to us, say, "Here's $50,000 of budget. I'm trying to drive email leads.
I can pay $100 every time someone gives me their email address for, let's say, this mortgage product that I'm looking at selling. That's my goal. Go do your job, Taboola. We will go do it. That is very much the way Meta works by default with advertisers. It is the way Google works by default with advertisers. We have the automation. We have the ability to do it for them. At the same time, we give complete visibility on the back end so that they know that they are not wasting money in some area. If they feel like they are, we will fix it for them.
Got it. So advertisers, publishers, clearly the product is working for them. What about end users? What is their experience like when they come across a site that is powered by Taboola?
Yeah. I think, I mean, the proof is in the pudding there too, right? At the end of the day, consumers vote by clicking. What we've shown is that for our homepage personalization tool, for instance, on average, the engagement goes up 20% to 40% when we have our personalization on there versus when the editorial staff is programming the homepage at the website, which makes sense when you think about it because the way things have been done forever in the news industry is, "What's our biggest story? And then what are our next biggest stories? And then what else might we want to put here?" It's just, it's not, and it's static, right? Everyone who comes there gets the same experience. Oops, sorry. If I go to ESPN, I probably want a different set of teams, a different set of sports than you do.
Why not personalize it to me? Why not watch what I do on the site all the time? Realize that, "Oh, he's a college hockey fan. That's unusual. Give him more college hockey on the homepage." I think that's where we can be impactful, and we show dramatically improved engagement rates. Same thing with if we're doing recommendations elsewhere on the site. We can show, and by the way, no publisher actually tests us on this anymore because they all accept it now. Back in the day, when we first started doing this, we had to show publishers, "You program a widget with your editorial staff. Let our AI do it, and let's see which one wins." Usually, we got 40% to 50% uplifts on click-through rates, which is what matters at the end of the day.
Yeah. I mean, it sounds like the proof is in the pudding when you are able to prove that out. I guess still early days for Realize. What does success look like to you with this new strategy? What will be the measures of success and over what time period?
Yeah. We haven't really, like I said, we haven't even built Realize into our guide yet because I want to see some traction for it before I want to start promising numbers on it. I can tell you what we expect when Realize has full traction is it'll have two very beneficial impacts for us. One is I expect our number of advertisers, scaled advertisers in particular, which is a new metric that we've released, to go up quite a bit because we think we're opening now to a whole set of advertisers that up until now just said, "Native, nah, not for me." Now it's, "Okay, we're not just native. We're performance." Everybody's got performance budgets. That's maybe outside of a few consumer packaged goods companies, which are purely brand. Almost everybody's got performance.
Now we open it up to a whole set of customers who up until now would have said, "Natives are really not for me." That means we think we'll grow our number of scaled advertisers. Likewise, on the other side, we think it'll help us grow revenue per advertiser because now I can go to all of our existing clients and even some of those new ones and say, "Yeah, I know that you've had this much budget in native for these ad positions over here, but look, I've got a whole new set of inventory for you now. Display spots on these pages. Other BD partnerships will do. You really should increase your spend, and we can now accept your display ads, your social creatives, whatever." It also opens budgets within those advertisers that we think will grow them overall.
We think it'll have a beneficial impact on both over time, and that'll grow the overall revenue of the business, which obviously is the end goal. Sorry, in terms of timing, in our internal models, we've said we think that it can start to have some impact on the back half of this year, but we just haven't built that into the guidance yet.
Right. Got it. Upside from here. All of this sounds like it's going to require some significant investment. I believe your guide for the year had EBITDA margins approximately flat. Can you talk a little bit about the investment required to launch Realize, whether or not you're pulling back in other areas, and just about your investment philosophy overall?
Sure. First of all, we started investing on Realize about a year ago. Fortunately, we were able to still do that while getting our EBITDA margins back up above 30%, which is always our goal because we basically started applying resources that were rolling off of Yahoo to Realize as they became available. In the back half of last year, we also started investing in the salespeople and some of the sales resources that we'll need to roll it out. For this year, I think the investment is going to be mostly a little bit of an increase in R&D. Sales and marketing, I think we have the right levels for right now. If we start to see some traction, we may invest more, but that would be only because revenue is growing faster than we expected.
I think overall, it's a little bit of R&D. Sales and marketing should be relatively flat. G&A will come down a bit because we keep continuing to gain efficiencies. That'll fund part of the R&D. Overall, margins, EBITDA margins will stay at around 30%, and we'll be investing in R&D to grow this. In terms of our general philosophy on investment, A, we always like to keep our EBITDA margins 30% and above. That's kind of how we constrain ourselves to make sure we're not getting too optimistic. Never say never. If we really saw an opportunity, we might let that slide. Like we did two years ago. We allowed our EBITDA margins to go down because we were investing in Yahoo. That was because we knew that we'd get significant growth out of it. It was worthwhile.
Generally, we want to keep EBITDA margins above 30%. Sales and marketing, generally speaking, will grow roughly in line with the growth of the business. Maybe if we get a robust self-serve business at some point, it can grow slower. For now, think of it as growing in line with the business. G&A, we will keep getting efficiencies on. R&D, we do view as a pure investment decision. Do we have things we want to invest in that we think will drive growth in the future? We increase or decrease R&D based on that.
With all of this new investment and the rollout of Realize, does this unlock any new opportunities with Yahoo?
I think it's going to be beneficial for Yahoo for sure because it's about unlocking demand. At this point, as a business, we're supply-rich, demand-constrained. I know Yahoo can do dramatically more revenue than we're doing with them today, but I'm demand-constrained. I just don't have enough budgets to drive more revenue to Yahoo or anywhere else on my network, frankly. Realize is really about unlocking more budgets from advertisers from areas that they haven't been spending with us today, it'll benefit Yahoo. I would expect their revenue to go up with us over time. It'll benefit the rest of our network because that is what we are today, is demand-constrained.
Got it. Now, let's say success is measured by scaled advertisers and average revenue per advertiser all start trending in the right direction and a strong direction. When do you think you'll be able to get back to, call it, double-digit type growth? I guess specifically, what are the stepping stones to actually get there?
Yeah. Let me talk about those metrics first, and I'll get to the double-digit growth. First of all, those metrics, scaled advertisers and average revenue per scaled advertiser, we obviously started releasing those because we think it gives a good indication of what's going on in our business. If in a particular year, our advertisers are relatively flat, but our revenue per advertiser is going up, you can see that, "Oh, they're doing a good job of growing budgets, but what's going on with the number of advertisers?" The one caveat I would give is I don't expect both of those to go up and to the right all the time.
For instance, if we did a great job of bringing on tons of new scaled advertisers, that actually has an inverse correlation with our average, the average revenue per scaled advertiser because they usually start smaller, and then you grow them over time. If you bring on a lot of new ones, it brings down your average. I do not necessarily expect them both to go up and to the right, but it will help us explain to investors what is going on. That was just a quick note on that. In terms of getting back to kind of growth rates that we are comfortable with, double-digit growth rates and beyond, I think we have not guided that. We have not set exactly the time frame. Like I said, we think that Realize will start to have an impact in the back half.
What basically needs to happen to have that happen is we need advertisers who today are not advertising in native to see us as the solution that we can be for performance. We also just need our existing advertisers to start to spend more with us on other types of budgets that they have. Between the two of them, we think we can get back to the double-digit growth rate quickly, but we're not promising any time frame.
Got it. We only have a couple of minutes left, so I'll be concise. You mentioned your positioning against Search and Social earlier. As we all know, there have been some changes to specifically the search ecosystem that may present some opportunities and threats going forward. I guess, how do you think Taboola.com's position to adapt to this evolving ecosystem?
I think we feel really good about our position because we have a very unique data advantage that's hard to replicate. The fact that we started in the recommendation space, that we're hard-coded on 11,000 publisher sites globally, and that because of that and because of the fact that we've got the advertiser relationships directly with pixels on their sites to see what's happening downstream, that gives us such a robust data advantage that's hard to take away. If you think about it, how do we lose that data advantage? Publishers would have to start kicking us off their sites, but they really like us. They want to work with us because we help them grow their business. Or performance advertisers would have to stop letting us see conversions. Why would they do that if they want us to drive conversions?
We think we're positioned really well because we're end-to-end. As you know, lots of companies now are trying to do kind of supply path optimization and try and be all the way end-to-end. We're already there. We have a very unique data advantage because of that that we think we can continue to apply. We feel good about where we are. It'll be interesting to see what happens with Google and kind of do they get broken up and what happens as a result of that. I don't think any of that necessarily affects what we think we're good at and where our advantage is. Google getting broken up probably benefits everybody to a certain extent.
Yeah. I would agree with that. I guess just closing question. There's a lot to be excited about as we look forward. What gets you out of bed in the morning? What gets you most excited?
Yeah. I mean, for us right now, it's Realize. We're excited about it. Our teams are excited about it. The buzz, we just went through our annual sales kickoff. Unfortunately, I couldn't travel to our APAC and European or South American ones, but I was at the New York one, and the buzz was incredible. Salespeople are saying, "Yes, this is what we need. This is how I unlock budgets." They're excited, which obviously gets everyone else excited. We're excited to see where that goes. I think I alluded to this earlier, but Adam Singolda, our CEO, likes to say, "2025 is the new 2012." What he means by that is in 2012 is when we started to gain kind of traction on our initial move into the recommendation space, and every day was a record, right? You'd see record revenue every day.
He is like, "This is going to be our 2012 all over again. We are going to see traction. We are going to see new records being set." We are excited. We are excited about Realize and see it roll out and gain traction.
That's great. Here's to 2025.
All right. Thank you.
All right. Thank you.
Thanks.