Taboola is a performance advertising platform that connects advertisers to publisher websites, mobile apps, and device OEMs across the open web — outside the walled gardens of Google, Meta, and Amazon. Taboola operates a two-sided marketplace: advertisers use the platform to place ads and drive measurable outcomes (leads, sales, app installs), while roughly 14,000 digital property partners — including Yahoo, Microsoft, NBC News, Disney, Samsung, and Xiaomi — use Taboola to monetize their audiences. Taboola makes money by running an auction where publishers supply ad inventory, advertisers bid to reach users, and Taboola takes a cut. The key financial metric is ex-TAC gross profit (revenue minus traffic acquisition costs paid to publishers). Taboola's core competitive asset is first-party behavioral data drawn from what users read and consume across its publisher network, which feeds an AI engine the company has built over 15+ years. Publisher supply is largely locked in under multi-year exclusive contracts, so growth is primarily a demand-side problem. In early 2025, Taboola launched Realize, an expanded performance advertising platform that goes beyond its historical native ad roots to include standard display, vertical video, and social-style formats, allowing advertisers to import existing creatives directly. The goal is to capture performance budgets currently allocated to fragmented DSPs and social platforms. Taboola tracks roughly 2,200 scaled advertisers (those spending over $100K annually), with growth in both advertiser count and spend per advertiser as the key revenue drivers.