Taboola

Taboola is a public advertising company headquartered in New York City. The CEO of Taboola is Adam Singolda, who founded the company in 2007. It provides advertisements such as "Around the Web" and "Recommended For You" boxes at the bottom of many online news articles. These sponsored links on publishers' websites send readers to the websites of advertisers and other partners. These online thumbnail grid ads are also known as chumbox ads. History Taboola was founded in 2007 by Adam Singolda. The company was founded in Israel and initially provided a recommendation engine for video content. The company headquarters were later moved to New York City. Taboola raised $1.5 million in funding in November 2007. This was followed by $4.5 million in November 2008 and $9 million in August 2011. Additionally, Taboola raised $15 million in February 2013. By 2019, Taboola was used to provide 450 billion recommendations every month, due to adoption by major news websites, like the IBM-owned The Weather Company. In 2014, Taboola acquired a California-based programmatic advertising company called Perfect Market. In February 2015, Taboola raised $117 million in a Series E funding round. In May of that year, Taboola announced additional funding from Baidu for an undisclosed amount. In July 2016, Taboola acquired ConvertMedia, a recommendation engine for video content. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In January 2017, Taboola acquired a website personalization firm called Commerce Sciences, for an undisclosed sum. Commerce Sciences' technology may re-work a website's layout, based on whether a user is more likely to click on a banner ad, newsletter, or video. In October 2019, Taboola announced its intention to merge with its rival, Outbrain, subject to regulatory approval. If implemented, the deal would have combined the internet's two largest content-recommendation companies. The aim of this merger was for the two companies to reach a bigger audience in order to be more competitive against the advertising activities of companies like Google and Facebook. Under the terms of the deal, Taboola would have paid Outbrain shareholders 30 percent of the combined company's stock and $250 million in cash.