I don't know.
Okay, so let's start. I'm Laura Martin. I'm the Senior Media and Advertising Analyst at Needham & Company, and I'm here to welcome Adam Singolda, who's the Chief Executive Officer, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Taboola. Taboola is a global content discovery and performance advertising platform that helps publishers and brands drive engagement and monetization across the open web.
He's launched the company in 2007, and it has since grown into a major ad tech player serving over a billion users monthly and thousands of publishers and advertisers worldwide. Under his leadership, Taboola has expanded beyond native ads into broader performance advertising products and strategic partnerships that challenge traditional ad stacks. Adam is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, shaping how content and ads interact online. Welcome, Adam.
This is fun. Thanks for having me.
Super fun. So why don't you, for people who don't know as much about Taboola as you and I do, why don't you level set and tell people, you know, what Taboola does and how it's unique in the ad tech ecosystem?
Yep. Thanks for having me. Taboola is the largest performance advertising company in the world outside of Google, Facebook, Amazon. You know, in the world, advertising is about a $1 trillion market, and more and more in recent years it's becoming a performance advertising-driven market. By that, I mean businesses, when they advertise to drive growth of their business, are looking for performance metrics.
Everyone is buying Google. Google is great. Everyone is buying Meta, and Amazon is recent. But then outside of those walls, it's much, it's called the open web. It's much harder to find performance. So we're focused exclusively on building the next, you know, alternative for advertisers when they look for performance advertisers. What's unique about us is, and I'm sure many of you have seen Taboola before, we have a, we're a two-sided marketplace.
We work with publishers such as Yahoo, Apple News, CNBC, ESPN, and incredible brands that people love and trust, and we have Code on Page, which gives us an ability to know you're the same person when you come back and render different experiences to try to optimize for advertiser success.
At the same time, Taboola is about a $2 billion business. Most of it is direct to the advertisers, so we're like an SSP and a DSP in one, which gives us a huge advantage in a performance kind of era where advertisers want outcomes. We reach about 600 million people a day, and we're having a good time.
And I would say that you're 100% CPC, which is cost per click, which is a performance metric. He doesn't do any CPM-based business. So that's important because Wall Street sort of thinks there's this pendulum swing towards performance.
Right. And I think there's a, you know, when we think about the funnel of how advertisers can spend, people used to, I mean, there's still the top of the funnel when you want people to be aware, and then there's the bottom of the funnel when someone is searching and they're about to make a decision. And a lot of times, what I think is happening, it's kind of like coming to the middle.
You know, that top of the funnel is too high level. It's hard to measure. Even Amazon on TV is proving that outcomes and measurements are needed by advertisers. And then the bottom of the funnel is too late. So it's all coming to this middle where, you know, where people consider to make decisions that matter. And that's where we see consumers when they read about stuff, when they consider making decisions.
You're in the consideration part of the purchase funnel.
We're just laser performance advertising right in the middle when people consider making big decisions. It's not too late. It's not too tough. It's just in the middle. And then we help them slowly progress down the funnel and make a decision.
So one of the things that Wall Street's really worried about (I'd be interested in your opinion, Adam) is that agentic commerce, like when you tell an agent, "Go out and find me the best camera," and he comes back and the agent says, "Oh, if you want one that's good at editing, buy this one.
If you want, and then buy now, buy now, buy now," and that it's going to collapse the purchase funnel, and there'll be ads on that agent, and those will be really valuable. But meanwhile, you got rid of the sort of reach, consideration, and purchase advertising funnel aspects of advertising. Can you comment on that?
I think there's a risk. In my mind, there's well, AI in general is a risk to, let's talk about the downside, then upside. It's a risk to those who are very exposed to search traffic because I think that might replace some of that search traffic. In our case, the vast majority of our business is driven by very large publishers who have small to no search traffic, like Yahoo and, you know, Samsung and Apple and big publishers like ESPN and NBC and others. But so we're fortunate.
You got 10%. I mean.
Tens of percent. But even if that goes down 30%-50%, it's not a big part of the business. And for us as a company, about 5% of the traffic in the U.S. of the revenue is coming from search. So the downside that we see, at least, is mitigated, though I'm concerned about long tail and smaller sites.
Now, the upside is interesting because if I go to a site that I love and I'm going to, you know, CNBC every day to check Squawk Box and stuff, or ESPN to, obviously, you know, I'm a huge Knicks fan. So I want to see what's up with the Knicks on ESPN. Now there's a question of, can they become the LLM engine that you interact with, that web interface, a new web interface? So I can ask ESPN a question about the Knicks versus traditional browsing.
Can they talk to me for five, 10 minutes and eventually lead me to an agentic experience that says, "Let me come back to you with some stuff about games you may want to watch," or "Let me offer you some products you may want to buy." So I think for trusted publishers, there's a huge, huge opportunity, much like I think there's one for Gemini versus traditional Google search.
I think AI will be a huge ARPU revenue driver for trusted brands because consumers are going to talk to them for a long time and eventually make a decision. So I'm very optimistic. You know, we have a product in market called Deeper Dive, which is early stages, but essentially it's the first free LLM AI-based for the open web. I really like what I'm seeing.
What does it do? What's the product do?
You can go and you can check it out. If you go to usatoday.com, anyone who listens to that can do it. Ask any question that's on your mind. Anything. Ask about the Knicks. Ask why you think the Knicks should win the championship, as an example, and see what comes up.
You'll see an answer only based on content that USA Today has written, and then it's going to show you an ad, and they're going to tell you, "Here are some things you should read because you like the Knicks." You'll read it, and then it will say, "Do you have another question for me?", and we're seeing people now talking to USA Today in ways I've never imagined before, and it's not agentic yet, so there are regular ads there.
But over time, I can imagine those engines saying, "How about I come back to you with more information about that topic? Let's talk tomorrow on your phone. And over the next two, three, four days, I may offer you to buy from me something." I think that is definitely a big part of the future. And we'll see, as always with, you know, innovation, winners and losers.
And I think there's going to be a huge advantage to those who have a lot of data and have a lot of distribution and scale. It's going to be much harder to compete if you're small because AI will become commodity.
If you don't have data.
Yeah, because anyone can download, you know, Llama and just play with it and tune it. But if you have no data to tune that LLM, I think you're going to be facing a significant challenge. I was just saying earlier to an investor here at the conference, when I started Taboola, $500 million in revenue was a big number.
Now it's like a high school hobby. You know what I mean? I mean, Taboola is a $2 billion business, and I think we're not, you know, there's a lot of growth for us to become really relevant. You know, we need to plan from $2 billion to $4 billion to $8 billion, $10 billion in revenue to capture, to build that bridge advertisers want to the open web. That is what's needed in an AI world.
Okay. Let's talk about Realize. So one of the big product innovations you've had, I think it's over a year old now, is Realize, and it's tried to take you from a native-only advertising platform to native + display because display is like three times bigger than native. So can you talk about, you know, why don't you talk about the Realize product for people who don't know what it is, and then what kind of progress you're seeing with it, and when we look out to 2026, how you see the trajectory of Realize adding to your revenue growth?
We launched, yeah, we launched Realize a year ago. Realize is essential. Think of it as it's our advertising console. So think of it as Meta advertising console, but for the open web. So it's a very.
It's your dashboard. It's like your dashboard.
But it's a significantly simplified version of what we used to do. So now it gives you. You can upload any format you may have. You can import your Instagram formats. If you have display, we'll take it. If you have native creatives, we'll take it. You can. It now gives you access to a much different type of supply. It's not only bottom of article. Now we have display assets. We have, you know, Apple News, which is different types of supply.
We have Mail. We have a lot of, you know, Outlook and Yahoo Mail. So now advertisers get a diverse range of supply. They have full flexibility on the formats, and they can buy all of that using CPC to your point. We're the only company, to my knowledge, you can buy display spot on a per-click basis.
So it's very appealing, you know, to advertisers that just want performance. They don't want to pay on impressions. They want to pay if it works. So now they have all these capabilities. It's much simpler. They have Abby, which is our AI agent in the front saying.
Small and medium businesses.
Saying, "Talk to us. We'll advise you what you should do." And we started, you know, we started the year last year. We've given a modest guidance for ad tech growth to give the team an opportunity to really go after this new market, expanded market. We've tripled that growth throughout the year, which is good, not good enough in my opinion, but needs to continue to go up.
And we did say in the last quarter that we're seeing, you know, an inflection point with advertisers coming to Taboola to just get performance, new types of advertisers. And we also encourage investors to look at scaled advertiser, which is a metric we share about how good Realize is at growing the amount of advertisers spending more than $100,000 a year with us. So we're seeing good progress, faster than I had anticipated.
I'm excited about this because I do think, much like AppLovin has done a great job building a two-sided marketplace in apps. Google, Facebook, Amazon has done the same for themselves. No one has done it in the open web. The Trade Desk has done a great job on the demand side. We've seen good SSPs doing it for, you know, the supply side. I think there's going to be a much greater need for a two-sided marketplace for everything else, and I'm excited about where it's going.
So one of the things that a big goal of Realize was to add display ad units. Has that happened, though? Or like you're seeing revenue grow, like Realize is working, but is it working by getting bigger budgets from your existing guys and native?
When I look at all the things advertisers do with Realize, that eventually the result of that is faster growth rates and profitable growth, you know, which we're using, as you know, to aggressively buy shares, which I'm very proud of the team, so I'm seeing some capabilities like predictive audiences, which is an ability for advertisers to upload a seed of conversions.
Let's say I'm a pizza oven and Taboola sees 100 people that have bought a pizza oven from me. Taboola now can predict how much will it cost you to get the next 100 clients, and you can say, you know what, I'll pay $20,000 for that, and you say yes, money's flowing in, and it just continues to go. That's been highly used and utilized, and that's a new capability that came about with Realize. We're seeing high hundreds of advertisers playing with display.
Financially, it's still early stages, which is good because there's still more room to grow. So I would say it seems like we're taking more markets here in the native space traditionally. And there's another growth coming, hopefully, with.
Because they're trying out display for the first time, and then we'll see if they adopt it in 2026.
Yeah. And we're also investing in, look, I mean, our company is known for one thing. You know, so it takes time to change people's idea about what we are. So we're investing more just in progressing the perception of what Taboola is. So we're the performance advertising company. To Google, Facebook, Taboola is a new thing for us.
And I think we're progressing. We're not done yet. So 2026 is a big year for us. I'm going to Bangkok on Sunday to meet the sales team and then Madrid. So, you know, we're just getting this, we have 600 sellers, you know, to get people excited about where it's going. And so we're still in investment mode to capture that opportunity. But like I said, happy to see, you know, we're seeing that inflection point to double-digit growth, which is what we used to do and hopefully we'll do again.
Well, let's stay on that topic because one of the things you guys have said as a key goal is to get back to double-digit revenue growth. So what does it take to do that? To accomplish that, what do you have to do right at Taboola?
Primarily demand. I mean, there's a lot of good things we're doing and a lot of good momentum across, you know, when I look around, you know, you can see good announcements. There's a lot of good juju around the company, but the main thing, the main focus is management and, you know, investors, community looking in. It's about getting more demand. We have an enormous amount of supply. Enormous. We're a small internet. We obviously want to get even more, and I think there's a great opportunity. We're in conversation right now with incredible publishers I always wanted to work with. So there's always room to grow, but to get more spend from advertisers, more scaled advertisers, that is the key thing we need to continue to push forward.
And becoming, as a brand, the default place people think of when they think of driving conversions, you know, the conversion machine. And again, I look at the industry around us. I'm quite encouraged because I think that's where it's going, even outside of Taboola. And it's really hard to do technologically. So I'm encouraged about the direction. But that's the main thing we need to do. More demand, more advertisers. That's the main unlock for growth.
Okay. Let's talk about Taboola News, right? So one of the things you did for a while is you had Google, you had Apple News that you represent advertising for, and you have Xiaomi, which is the biggest handset maker. And but we've stopped adding Taboola News. I think we stopped adding Taboola News like outlets, if you want, or clients. So what's happened with that product?
So it is one of our, and I believe we've said it in the last quarter, it is one of our fastest growing part of the business. For those who may not know, Taboola News is essentially us rendering news on OEM devices so that when you buy a device such as a Samsung or a Xiaomi, you can have news you may like on the device. And that creates an advertising opportunity for advertisers in a much more intimate environment. It's on my phone, which I look at 100 times a day. So it is.
Is this you? This is my iPhone. Is this you? Or is this somebody else? This Apple.
Apple News. We show the ads here.
You show the ads here.
Yeah, so in this case, that's them. You know, Apple News is unique in that we're the only company they work with outside of themselves that monetizes that. So that's.
So the ads are you, but the.
They do the content. When we also show the news, that's the Xiaomi, Samsung, and others that we've said publicly. And that is growing very fast. And in terms of names, there aren't many OEMs in the world. I mean, this is a fairly small amount of names. But the way it's growing so fast is a combination of more devices. They essentially put Taboola News on and us improving the revenue per user by improving targeting and more advertising and things like that. So it's, I love that business. I think it's also very diversified in an AI world. It's not exposed to search at all. You know, so there's a big opportunity for that to become even more valuable, I think, over time for consumers.
Okay. So Taboola News, are we going to get any new device makers, or is the growth mostly going to come by more revenue from the device makers you have?
I think it's more devices, more countries, and more ad opportunities. We can improve the revenue per user. There aren't many names we don't work with, at least to some degree already.
Okay. Fair enough. Okay. Let's go to e-commerce. So there was a, two years ago, you said somebody that doesn't have any commerce strategy is like not having a mobile strategy five years ago. And so what's happening with e-commerce connectivity? How did the, like, December quarter go? What's been going on in the e-commerce sector?
I really like that. So commerce is the largest segment of the performance advertising market. So when we think about performance advertising companies, the biggest part of it is e-commerce, and it's a growing part of that business. So it is very important to be in it and be good at it. I also seen, interestingly enough, the fastest growing in e-commerce that I'm seeing is the Creator Economy.
Really?
Yeah. So in a world where, you know, of websites getting less traffic, small ones, creators are not going away. They're just getting reborn as creator, you know, in the creator economy. So what happens is they're coming to Taboola. And they're, you know, we have a huge index of products. It's a big part of our business. So they're picking up products they like. They create reels and things on Instagram. They link to it, and it drives conversion. And we're seeing people that, you know, make tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I mean, that's people's job now, Taboola. And people I've never met, we've never met before. So it's quite interesting to imagine where's that also going in terms of what's the new long tail, you know, as we know it today.
We used to know it as small sites that I go to you and you offer me something, and maybe the new version of that is I follow you on Instagram and I buy something from a story that you posted, so I think there's an interesting growth engine to that on top of what we're seeing, but yeah, I feel very, you know, happy that we got into that business just post-IPO. Obviously, it's a very profitable part of our business and continues to grow.
Okay. And so if I want to size this for, and remind me how big political is. Is political be a big driver this year?
I mean, in general, political is not a big part of our business.
Even in the election years or the mid-cycle years. Okay. That's interesting.
We always said that, like, because to really do political, you have to really invest in DC, which we've to date never done, so some companies have local offices and a lot of long-term investment, which we've never really done. We do get some budgets from that through programmatic and things, but it was never a big part of our business.
Okay. All right. So when I think about big drivers this year, it sounds like Realize is the primary driver, and then maybe Taboola News is second, and then e-commerce is third, and then political is fourth.
Yeah. I mean, what I tell the team, what I'm going to tell the team on Tuesday in Bangkok is there are parts of this, you know, tens of billions of dollars market, such as personal finance, home and garden, automobile, e-commerce. If you don't buy from Taboola or try Taboola, you're risking your job. Now, we're not great in everything. Like, there's a lot we're not better than others. But if you run an insurance company, a credit card, a bank, and you're not trying Taboola, and you're obviously buying Google and Facebook, I don't know. I mean, your career is at risk because it's irresponsible not to try it out. We may not succeed, but we're very good at it. So what I tell people is there's a huge part of the market that if we focus, we will excel and break through.
So, and that is the main thing we need to do. Everything else is an upside, you know, AI. There's a lot of good things going on. But if we just do that well, like we've done in 2025, I believe there's a path to double-digit growth at a very nice, you know, we know our financial philosophy. And I still think the company is undervalued, which means we intend to continue to aggressively buy shares back. You know, we bought, I don't know, 14%. I think that's the last number we published last year of Taboola back. Nice. So I'm very, you know, proud of the team for doing that good job.
Okay. And now you guys have never done acquisitions, I don't think. Have you ever bought anything since you've been public?
Oh, Connectivity.
Yeah, that's true. You did buy Connexity right after you went public. But you're really more of a builder than a buyer of acquisitions. Is there anything that you need to buy to accelerate your path?
So one, I think for me, I like Taboola being a double. So I feel more comfortable when I see double-digit growth, 30% EBITDA margin, you know, 60%- 70% free cash flow conversion. When you get this consistent behavior, then I think it should be allowed to buy companies.
You have to earn your right to buy it.
I personally want. I like consistency, predictability, and a good business versus, you know, things that may be good now but not be good later. So I want to invest in Realize. I want to continue what we're doing, get to a place where I'm much happier with where we are. And then I think, you know, we can always look at things, but we don't have gaps, material gaps. We're always looking at opportunities. But we don't have any material gaps that I'm seeing that warrant a big step. Also, I don't want to dilute our shares with investors with this current share price. So, not motivated to do something big.
That makes sense. Okay. So generative AI. You guys were really early adopters of AI tools and Gen AI tools. So tell us how you're using Gen AI and AI tools today in optimization and, you know, create like some, what are those little things called?
Thumbnails.
Thumbnails. Like you were really good about getting people early to adopt those kinds of things to get your yields up. So let's tell people what you're, how you're using Gen AI today and what's on the roadmap this year by the end.
Yeah. Yeah. We started with the advertising product, making it easier for.
Three years ago.
Yeah, smaller advertisers. And they're using it and they're loving it. And it's been a good utility for them, for advertisers to create best practices, creatives that could work on Taboola. The second wave was with our President and COO, Eldad, who you met, and he's a half robot. He's a very data-driven guy. And so with him, you know, we really try to ask ourselves, how can we internally embrace AI in the most, you know, we build roadmaps for each department head presented. You know, what do they think they can do? What's the AI vision for Steve, our CFO? What's our, you know, our AI vision for HR, for R&D? R&D is probably the most advanced in terms of using different AI products to produce code faster and things of that nature.
I still think there's a lot of work for us to be done, but that's a good thing because it means we can hopefully be more productive with the people we have, so I think that's a good trend.
Is there an AI Council? A couple of guys on stage today have said they had an AI Council. So when someone comes to them and wants to add headcount, they send that general manager of the AI Council. And the AI Council is like, you should be doing this and you should be. People are like experts in AI.
I'm looking at Steve.
Steve, you know what headcount for you?
You must have an opinion about that. I don't think we have one today, but who knows? So no, but we're trying to be critical about, you know, those things always. And so I think we're progressing really nicely and there's more work to be done. And the recent big one was in June of last year, we launched Deeper Dive, which is, you know, such an exciting part of Taboola, which is basically an LLM for the Open Web. You know, LLM is a very expensive thing.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's unlikely that people will develop their own engine. I think we're going to see at least two winners, you know, OpenAI, you know, maybe Anthropic and then Gemini. So ones with no ads. Yeah, Gemini with ads. The rest, I'm not sure what's going to happen. Perplexity, all these guys, I don't know.
If it's public, maybe I would short it. But I mean, you know, I'm not sure what I think about this. But in the meantime, publishers are not going to invest millions of dollars in NVIDIA servers, building a model. It's not going to happen. I don't think so. Maybe some, but not most. So for me, as publisher's best friend for the last decade, I think there's an opportunity to build that next interface so consumers can come to any publisher they love and ask a question in their own language. We can predict what questions you may like and, you know, become a big.
It doesn't drive revenue, does it?
Oh, yeah. So if you go to your site today and search any question, you'll see ads on this new experience. So outside of Gemini, which show ads on LLM, I believe we're the only one that I know of that when you ask a question in an LLM engine, you see ads. And these are high-converting ads. So it's early, but it's, you know, it's exciting enough for my creator at USA TODAY to speak about it with investors at Gannett earnings. We've launched, you know, incredible publishers almost every few weeks, someone is launching. And it's still early financially.
Taboola search, what's the prompt?
It's Deeper Dive.
Oh, Deeper Dive is the name of the, and it's basically just a Gen AI search engine. And the LLM is built on the back of Gemini or OpenAI?
We have a bunch of models that we've trained with our first-party data.
What cloud are you sitting on?
It's our own servers.
Okay, so you're sitting on.
Most of Taboola is hosted on cloud. Cloud will be a very expensive exercise for us given our type of business. So we have our own CapEx and servers. We're hosting our core business and also LLM. But I'm excited about an opportunity, you know, when Google first started, I don't know, 25 years ago or so, the next thing that happened outside of Google was site search. People expected to search when they went anywhere outside of google.com. It was an expected experience by consumers. People now talk, and I think they're going to expect to talk with anyone else outside of ChatGPT and Gemini, and I prefer to talk to ESPN about the Knicks versus talking to ChatGPT about the Knicks.
You mean verbal, like just verbal, is that what you're saying?
Type or audio, you know, I want to have, you know, I prefer LLM on a favorite publisher of mine so I can talk to them about something that I like.
Okay.
That's our recent kind of investment in AI.
What's the business model for that? To generate revenue?
We show ads. We show revenue with a publisher.
I see. Okay. Got it. But because it's a search ad, it has higher conversions, higher click-through rates, and that gives you more revenue. Okay. All right. So one of the things that I think Wall Street's sort of trying to puzzle through is we're spending round numbers, $2 trillion, $3 trillion, building these infrastructures for these five or six LLMs. And in order for that to pay off, some of them at least have to have 15% new revenue streams over 30 years to pay off this investment. And the question is, if the economy is only growing 2%, where are there, who loses? Like who's big enough in a pool of money that might be able to move over here to create incremental 15% new revenue for Google and Amazon and Anthropic for these big LLMs that are being purchased? And so digital advertising is big enough.
The open internet, it probably isn't because it's only 50 billion. But if you think about digital advertising, including some of the walled gardens that aren't Google, then some of that, like let's say Meta loses, like its revenue would then come up for grabs to move over to an LLM. So when you think about digital advertising, how do you think about the moat that sits around the ecosystem called digital advertising and might some of it end up back at the LLMs and get disintermediated?
Look, the advertising market overall is $1 trillion.
That's global.
But that's global and that's across different channels. And a lot of it will change because advertisers are going to look for outcomes. Outcomes is the name of the game. It's the theme for 2026 across everything. I think it's all about show me that, you know, what's the value of the money I gave you, whether I gave it to you for TV or out of home or search or socially, it doesn't matter. That trillion-dollar is all going to be outcome-driven market. And all of that is up for grabs. I think, you know, Andrew Ross Sorkin, you know, did say there's a bubble. You know, the bubble is probably not OpenAI. It's probably not Gemini. I think Gemini is going to be the biggest.
I agree with you. Winner.
I said on a podcast, I think Google is going to be the first $10 trillion company.
I don't know that you're wrong.
I think that Google, people, it's almost amusing to me to hear people ask themselves about search business, what's going to happen. I think Sergey Brin is sitting in his office saying, how can I kill search so fast so everything becomes Gemini because I'm making so much money there?
They're integrating it everywhere throughout their whole tech stack, every product.
It is beautiful. It's so good for them, and it's also good for, again, I think LLM, like I'm looking at our business. If you open web, it's about 2 billion people that are surfing the web. If you can convert 10% of them to use LLM, that is a very big advertiser.
Huge numbers.
Hopefully ours.
Not Gemini's.
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, there's always room for someone that's not walled garden, like historic.
I actually think LLMs might end up being enterprise because of the security constraints and less consumer. Like ChatGPT might be the only consumer-facing one.
What about Gemini?
No, I think it might focus on enterprise. They're doing Defense Department stuff. They're doing stuff that takes a lot of security because they have that, and it charges a lot more than consumer.
So you see, now we have something to follow up on in a year from now. You see? It's good for us to not agree on everything. I think that Gemini.
The consumer is the big money pool here.
I think that search, as we know it today, the blue link Google, significant part of it will become Gemini, which is a consumer business. It's going to be amazing for advertisers because the intent is going to be so much better. It's going to be a slow burn of conversation until I decide. So advertisers will benefit. It will grow the market for LLM and Google specifically. And I think the rest of the world, the open web, could basically mirror what Gemini is doing. So I'm very optimistic about Gemini as a consumer advertising business. I think OpenAI will remain SaaS and enterprise. I don't think OpenAI will be a big advertising business. Maybe a few billions of dollars, but nothing big.
Yeah. Yeah. Anthropic is also going after enterprise.
Right.
But Google Gemini just signed with Apple, which is clearly an enterprise purchase, not a consumer purchase.
The last time they signed something big with Apple, it was, you know.
$20 billion big.
Of ads.
The last one, yeah. I don't know about ads.
It's search ads.
The default search engine, but yeah.
Yeah, it's the search ads. So I mean, we'll see. We'll see. We don't know yet. But that was obviously an exciting partnership for both of them in the industry because that will grow this LLM supply. The biggest thing that doesn't exist yet today is there's not enough LLM supply. You have OpenAI, no ads. Gemini ads, Deeper Dive ads, but that's still fairly early stages. So I think those partnerships are good for the industry, specifically for advertisers.
Okay. Yeah, I hope so. I hope you're right about that. Questions from the audience for Adam?
No, I'm not always right, but you know, more often than not.
It's so much fun when we disagree.
That's true.
It was so much fun when we disagree. I hate agreeing with you all the time. Any questions? Okay. All right. Let's keep going then. Okay. So when you look at a year from now, what is it you want to have accomplished? What would have been a success for Adam and what would have been a failure for Adam from one year from now?
So not robots that we talked about earlier.
So excited. Can't wait till they can do more than full blown.
Yeah, it's just execution. I just focus on execution. We don't need any new things. We need to do what we need to do. We have what we need to do it. And that's the main. I just want to see execution. I'm excited about execution. The biggest innovation is execution. So I just want to, to me, 2026 is the theme of, you know, really growing, progressing towards being that performance place, whether that's a TV advertiser, LLM advertiser, you know, in-app advertiser. If you want an outcome, consider Taboola. In segments we're good at, like I said earlier, in these high consideration segments, we're not good in everything, but in some categories of the market, we're very good at and we need to continue to invest so they consider Taboola when they are looking to grow.
So what are your top five categories that you're really good at?
Holistically, it's anything that requires high consideration.
Like a car, is that what you mean?
Automobile, healthcare, personal finance.
Insurance, probably.
Yeah, like personal finance, home and garden.
That's a big consideration segment.
Yeah. I mean, you're not buying a, you know, you're not buying something for your house quickly. You're doing some research. You're reading about that, you know, what's healthy, what's good, what's up and coming. There's a lot of, so those are, we're very good at the, very, very good. So e-commerce.
Coke and Pepsi, not so much because it's like impulse purchase.
Less. I mean, we're, yeah, we're less of that. Less traditional, you know, kind of like TV, Super Bowl, everyone should see. That's not what we're, and we're not vying for those budgets. Those are traditional CPM reach budgets.
Yeah. Also not John Deere tractors, which is very niche. Not that either.
Yeah.
Because those are real niche markets where there's a lot of expertise in both the buy side and the sell side.
Yeah. If this decision is important and it requires some consideration, we tend to be very good at it.
Okay. All right. So that's your main focus of your client base.
Yeah.
Realize is really well suited for that.
Yeah.
Self-serve, what's happened to Abby in terms of adoption?
Growing. I mean, it's still a small portion of the business, but we're investing more in it. I don't think we shared any new numbers on that, but I love it. It's a great, these are great advertisers that try Taboola, and over time, you know, I really like the idea of, you know, machines doing good work for Taboola. So I like that business.
Okay. Is your wife using it?
Not yet.
Not yet? She's still not using it?
No. She said she's keeping that because I gave her a budget. I did tell her, you know, that's a Taboola, you know, because she participated in the video.
I remember she was.
So in exchange, Taboola said, you have some budget, use it. She didn't do it yet. She's waiting for the right moment.
Oh, that's really funny.
I'm going to tell her it came up in the conversation.
Yeah. Tell her it came up, and the answer needs to be yes. Your wife has used this product.
And to be honest, she, you know, she tends to complain more. So it's an opportunity for me to complain back.
There we go. That's good. I like it. Getting even.
Yes.
I like it. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. So what you're most excited about a year from now, what would you deem success? Is more Abby, more adoption of Realize, right?
Yeah.
By employees.
Growth rates, you know, performance advertising, perception progressing towards being, you know, scaled advertisers.
Expansion so that you can be.
Yeah. More advertisers working with us. Just 2025 was a good year of execution.
Yes.
And I just, I want to continue to drive that forward.
No LLM or like no tech goals?
So I, you know, I try for things that are early stages in our financial impact to be conservative in what, you know, am I very, very excited about, you know, Deeper Dive things? Yes. But to investors in opportunities like this, I prefer to speak about things that have a significant impact on the business. It's a $2 billion business. Not, you know, to grow double digit means you have to create hundreds of millions of dollars of net new revenue. So Deeper Dive is not there yet. But I'm very excited about it, but it's not something I think investors should yet track.
Right. Okay. So it's more you need stuff that's adding 50 million or 70 million.
Yeah.
And so you think your total political will be less than $10 million this year?
Maybe, maybe a little more, a little less, but it's still small in any case. You know, like I'm looking for hundreds of millions, you know, so it's still fairly small. But if you listen to me on CNBC, you may hear me speak about AI. It just depends on the context.
Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm excited about AI. I think it changes everything.
Me too.
Are you seeing on your, you have a lot of exclusive control over like 4,000 websites. What's the average diminution in traffic you've seen?
I mean, so like I said, we have about 5% of our business is driven by search.
Yeah.
It is going down. I don't know if we shared numbers, but it's the tens of % of that number. It's small effectively, but that's what we're seeing of the bigger publishers. Tens of %, 20%, something like that.
You said high single digits.
High single digits. You see something like that.
Across the whole network.
High single digits percentage decline of our search traffic. So it's like, think of it as like 8% of 5%.
Okay. Because I had a guy tell me today that he had 10% search traffic, but what he's seen across this is 10% overall declines and 30% in some cases declines for some publishers. So even though.
Of search?
No.
Of everything?
Everything. Yeah.
I haven't heard that yet, but I, so actually I do hear, you know, 20%-30%; some publishers report that. But remember that the search traffic is low-engagement traffic. So the publisher revenue impact is much smaller. Even if you lost 5% of search traffic or 10% of search traffic, you probably lost a third of revenue because that traffic tends to be, you know, in and out.
Okay.
It's not like homepage traffic or email traffic. They tend to engage a lot more. It is impacting publishers, but the revenue impact is smaller.
Does it lower your guarantees? Does it lower the hurdles you have for getting supply? Because in the past, sometimes you've had to give guarantees to get really high quality supply.
Yeah.
Does it lower that?
It's not material enough that it's in my mind, you know, the guarantee portion of that. You know, in general, I think we're happy to give guarantees if it's needed because we're good at predicting that. But the percentage of guarantee revenue we have over time went down significantly. So it's much less of an ask publishers have, especially as we're now bigger, we're public. You can look at our numbers. We can, you know, stories are stories. Performance is performance. So people know, you know, they look at our financials, they feel comfortable with what we have. So we've been asked less over the last few years.
Okay.
But I'm happy to do it if it can help.
Right. If it helps people get to yes with Taboola. Any other questions before I call it? Okay. My last one is, what is the thing that you think Wall Street is missing that's sitting here a year from now, you know, you think we should have anticipated? What's the biggest surprise you think Wall Street's going to have this year? Having to do with ad tech or generative AI, something that you work in.
I do think that we're going to be much, much more educated on llM&Advertising in a year from now. It's probably the biggest, you know, revelation we're going to have as an industry, not only investors, but I think as an industry, we are yet to understand the value of a dollar on an LLM in an LLM experience, and if LLM is going to continue to grow and capture users' time, by obviously it's going to be a huge advertising business. You know, Netflix never did ads, now ads all day long. You know, Uber is doing ads. It's the number one line of EBITDA for Amazon. Ads is a significant part of the economy, so it's going to be a big part of LLM. It's new.
And I think all of us investors, you know, agencies, we're all going to be. It's almost like CTV year one. You know, we didn't really know what's going to be the CTV future. It was growing, you know, an app on your TV that you can watch TV. It was the beginning. I don't know, seven years ago when you started really talking about it back then. I feel like we're. It's like CTV year one.
Okay.
In a year from now, we're going to be so much smarter about LLM advertising as an industry.
Okay. Okay. That would be a big surprise. I do think people think generative AI is applicable to everything, and I don't think it's going to end up being applicable to everything. One thing that was interesting, I just ran an AI panel. They said they think it breaks down corporate silos, which is a hot take because, you know, all of corporate America is super siloed between engineering and sales and product, and he's saying, you know, to make these LLMs really effective, they need to be system wide. So that means you break down silos between operating groups, which I think is a really interesting, that would be disruptive from an organizational design point of view.
Yeah.
If silos weaken, you know, and that would probably make everybody more efficient if silos weaken.
Yeah. And look, to your point also earlier about the bar for companies to start, like investors now historically had to invest so much money in private companies, you know, for a team to get a company going to try in this new world. I mean, what do you really need? You know, you can have Cursor or Anthropic and get a software going in days.
Yeah.
So the level of private investment will be much smaller. Maybe the valuation will be higher, but you don't need so much money to get going, which means more companies will come up, more, you know, more investments, more advertising, more opportunities. I think it's a really exciting future from that perspective.
But one of the things that Michael Barrett from Magnite said is he said, "Look, once everybody has these AI tools, you commoditize everything." So then you have to figure out what's your distinction. And it's going to be people. It's going to end up coming back to people because the tools and the algorithms are all going to get best practice or you're going to get driven out of business.
Right.
So the people who survive are all going to have the really great LLMs. They're going to have great tech. So what differentiates you and what helps you get the sale is people. So that's an interesting perspective. I mean, a clear CEO perspective, of course, but I think that's interesting.
I think those who have data and distribution win and those who don't, I think go away. I mean, because then you're just like everyone else.
Yeah. No, that's fair. I'm going to call it there. Thank you so much, everybody, for coming in.
Thank you.