What you need to know:

• Taboola CEO Adam Singolda reckons there is $55bn in wasted money going into overpriced search and social and via the murky adtech supply chain.
• He’s trying to push it into publisher coffers by putting performance ads higher up their pages, lifting formats directly from social channels and using AI-powered ‘conversion max’ technology that tracks performance from user to transaction.
• Marketers investing in brand to try and reduce soaring performance ad costs are risking their jobs, per Singolda. He claims it won’t deliver what they want.
• He wants to give them another option – at least to social media, except with transparency baked-in – and pull open web publishing back from the brink.

Maxed factor

Both social and search are “maxed out”, per Singolda. Hence soaring prices and slumping ROI in both channels.

The likes of Temple & Webster locally would attest to that truth – last month showing that CAC has doubled in five years, while ROI has fallen roughly 40 per cent. Hence the ecom pureplay earmarking upwards of $10m of its $100m 2025 marketing budget for brand building in a bid to fill the tanks. Previously its spend had been entirely performance-driven.

Singolda thinks that’s a bold move.

“I get why people are trying those things. Maybe in some markets, you're so out of options that you're trying to be creative by putting some money into brand advertising in the hope that it increases your organic traffic and effectively reduces your price [acquisition cost],” he told Mi3.

“I salute it as a creative idea. But I think if you have a choice, you'll never do it. There's no world in which you don't risk your job, whereby you have an option to put a dollar into something that creates results, but [instead] you choose branding.

“Either you have too much money to spend – and those days are gone – or they actually don't have another option for performance. So they're trying to be creative, and they're saying ‘I'll warm up the funnel. It's going to create more organic traffic to me, effectively reducing my paid performance needs, and that's going to reduce my price’.

“That is actually a very sophisticated way of handling a market whereby you don't have another option to search and social that you can really rely on.”

Singolda is positioning Taboola to be that option – though largely for social. Search, he says, remains in a category of one – at least for now.

“Search is the best. The only sad news about search, I guess, is generative AI. Outside of that, it's untouchable. It's the best,” he says, hence sustained price inflation.

“But Meta is probably the best proxy for us … when advertisers compare us on outcomes, they usually compare us to Meta.”

Others – like Suncorp marketing boss Mim Haysom, pumping more money into search amid heightened demand and inflated search ad prices while ring-fencing brand budgets to fill the funnel – would disagree it’s a binary brand-performance choice.

But Singolda reckons brand is being universally crushed by performance. Hence the firm pivoting from the $4bn total addressable market in native ads – once known as ‘chum boxes’, of which Taboola ($1.8bn in 2024 revenue) has cornered about half – to pushing performance ads higher up into publisher pages, circa 9,000 of them.

Performance eats brand

“The industry at a macro level is going more and more towards performance advertising and outcomes,” per Singolda.

“Advertisers want growth for their business, and they need to attach themselves and how they spend their time and money at the CMO level and down to outcomes, attribution models, measurement.

“Which means if you're good at performance advertising, you're going to probably find more growth. If you're not, then it's going to be, I'm predicting, harder for you to stay around. Because I'm not sure there's going to be a lot of money coming your way over time.”

The speed at which that happens varies by market, acknowledges Singolda, “but I think the end result is the same globally”.

Given Taboola aims to triple its revenues via a pivot into performance advertising, Singolda has a vested interested in that outcome. But he sees Taboola as a saviour of the open web, or at least, the quality publishers getting squeezed out by platforms and a somewhat hypocritical ‘adjacency’ argument from media buyers around brand safety while social media, and its myriad content horrors, gets a free pass.

He doesn’t buy the adjacency argument.

“Nobody wants to be next to something aggressively bad or sad. But for the most part, I don't think there's any problem. Why would a news publisher be less quality than Instagram or TikTok? I don't think that's the reason. If advertisers got TikTok-level performance with publishers, they would double, triple and quadruple their spend,” per Singolda.

“The problem is not quality. TikTok is obviously less quality and less safe for our children than NBC News. The problem is value [or lack thereof]. You give people value and they will give you the keys, and that is what I hope to do.

“In my opinion, [our] publishers are the definition of premium and now we just have to match the value they get to TikTok and Meta – and if we do that, we save the world.”

Another hero

Singolda acknowledges that tech companies have made publishers similar promises over the last 15 years.

The first wave of programmatic adtech firms, and then the likes of AppNexus were going to save publishing from the platforms and boost yields. But they ended up either stealing their audience data and arbitraging eyeballs more cheaply and profitably elsewhere, or crashing and burning as Google squeezed out rivals.

But Singolda aims to prove sceptics wrong.

“We're going to continue to try. We arguably pay the most to publishers collectively in the world. Last year we paid 65 per cent of $1.8 billion [in revenue] to publishers, something like that. So we're putting up a good fight. We're paying over a billion dollars a year to publishers. It's not bad.”

Pixel power

Singolda claims Taboola can deliver social-like performance via publishers, because it has pixels embedded on their pages that scoop up first party data and allow it to track what’s converting on any page across 600 million people daily.

He claims its AI is trained on circa 500 million conversions a year, and can effectively provide lookalikes based off that data to advertisers. Plus it has lately embedded an AI-powered interface that makes it easy to plug in social and performance ads and stick them on publisher pages.

“Say you’re a pizza oven manufacturer and you get 50-100 conversions on native advertising with Taboola. Now you're able to say, ‘get me the next 100 conversions based on the price I already pay’. So let's say the CPA paid is $100, we're going to look for more conversions at that price and we can predict to you how many we think we can get,” per Singolda. “It’s like lookalikes, but for conversion.”

Hence his conviction Taboola can eat adtech’s lunch, where much of the highly fragmented market is powered by questionable third party data, and compete with social, because it can track conversion while delivering cheaper CPAs.

Client testimonials in yesterday’s investor presentation back that claim – one slide suggests carmaker Peugeot is notching leads 2.45x cheaper than its benchmark and CPAs 14 per cent lower than other campaigns, with similar claims for the likes of Vodafone and Etoro.

Either way, the vast majority of Taboola’s business comes direct from advertisers, “I would say 80 per cent,” per Singolda, which negates agency gatekeeping on adjacency grounds.

There are some big names on its advertiser roster – Salesforce, BMW, General Motors, Mercedes Benz, Hitachi HSBC, Dell, Citi, Cisco, American Express and Verizon – and its investor slide-pack claims Taboola now has more than 2,100 advertisers spending over $100,000 annually.

Singolda said Taboola plays from “mid-size to enterprise” advertisers, and unlike Meta and Google, has not yet cracked the SME market – which might partially reassure publishers worried about the potential for low-grade performance ads starting to climb their premium pages amid Taboola’s performance pivot.

But the prospect of a $55bn swing amid increasing publisher revenue pressure might outweigh such concerns outright.

Like Pmax – ‘but transparent’

Singolda is convinced advertisers will buy-in – because soaring search and social costs are only going one way, and there are concerns about AI-powered black-box approaches now being ramped up by Google (PMax) and Meta (Advantage+) that allow advertisers little control or visibility on where their money is being spent.

Singolda says Taboola is actually taking a similar automated approach – but with full transparency.

He suggests the bulk of Taboola’s $1.8bn revenue now comes from advertisers set to ‘Max Conversion’, which like Pmax, is optimised by AI to outcomes, but advertisers actually get to see where their ads run – and can block sites they don’t want to run on.

“Max Conversion essentially allows advertisers to not choose the CPM or the CPC. We do that for them. They just give us a CPA goal. So that's something that is the default billing strategy for Google and Meta. It's now 70 per cent adopted by advertisers,” says Singolda. “So Max Conversion has been adopted by 70 per cent of our revenue.”

Retail media: off network boom

About a fifth of Taboola’s revenue – ex cost of traffic acquisition – currently comes from ecom advertisers. Singolda aims to grow it, and sees a major opportunity in retail media.

“I look at ecommerce as the number one performance segment … Twenty per cent of our business now is commerce … What happens with retail media, and how it might unfold over the next three to five years, is that the retailers have unique data that takes place on their site, but they don't have necessarily the scale to fulfil everything the advertiser wants to do,” says Singolda.

“That means they have to go outside and buy – it's like an audience extension strategy – off network. And the end result of is … maybe more than 50 per cent of traffic and maybe conversions take place [off network].

“There's enough indicators now that is where it's going, especially for smaller retailers. So companies like us – we reach 600 million people every day globally – we could be a good home for those retailers to say, ‘well, let's connect our data pipes and show products, and you drive back people to buy the product on our site’,” says Singolda.

“So commerce is already big for us, and we'll see how retail media unfolds. But I suspect it's going to be a lot of off network partnerships, given that the desire for advertisers to spend more than the retailer can satisfy will grow.”

CTV malappropriated?

Singolda doesn’t rule out pushing into performance video. But for now, he says Taboola has enough on its plate. Along with retail media, CTV has been the fastest growing ad channel in recent years, but advertisers viewing it as a performance vehicle are “wasting money”, Singolda suggests.

“CTV, hands down, does not equal performance,” he says, though Amazon is the exception, because it can link its video ads to sales on amazon.com. Outside of that, “nobody scans on a TV ad, sitting with their kids at home, and says, ‘now is a good time to open a bank account or get a credit card’. It's never going to happen,” per Singolda.

“TV is a very important part of the funnel. But when you look at performance advertisers and how they look at click through and attribution models, you can't compare Meta, Tik Tok, search to TV.”

Yet DSPs shifting focus to CTV are the reason publisher display revenue declines have sharpened, along with a simultaneous budget swing to platforms’ owned and operated properties.

“For those reasons, there's just not enough money coming in for programmatic, and if we're successful as a way to attract those performance budgets and bring back programmatic revenue up beyond bottom of article, that's how I want to double my publishers’ revenue.”

Open web ‘not dead’

In the longer term, he’s aiming a lot higher.

“We estimate there's $55 billion spent a year between social, which we think is delivering diminishing returns, and adtech, the display network, that should be better spent and can go to publisher websites,” says Singolda.

“I think publishers can make more money and advertisers can get more value. And that's what we're going after.

“I think The Trade Desk has done an amazing job on CTV. If you want to buy CTV, The Trade Desk is really good at that. So I imagine Taboola will do the same for performance.”

While there are plenty of doomsayers suggesting he open web is about to drown in a tsunami of AI-generated junk, Singolda remains upbeat.

“It’s not looking shaky. I’d say we’re about a one out of ten on the CPM front and the revenue front,” he says.

“Publishers are yet to meaningfully adopt AI … So there's still a lot of opportunities that will drive engagement growth.

“The average articles being read on the open web, so the average person, when they land on a publisher site, they read between one and a half to two pages.

"Compare that to 50 minutes on Meta or an hour and three minutes on TikTok. So we haven't done enough. But now there's a crisis called AI and now we may do more," per Singolda.

“I think we'll see search traffic continue to go down – 100 per cent it's happening – and we will see [publisher] CPMs rise. And between those two, can we at least mitigate the decline? Yes. Can we even get more upside? Maybe. So that's my source of optimism.”