How Taboola Makes Money

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Taboola makes money by selling clicks. Advertisers pay Taboola to place their links in recommendation widgets on publisher websites, and Taboola passes a share of that ad revenue to the publishers who host the widgets. The company sits in the middle as a marketplace operator. Its AI decides which recommendation each reader sees, it collects the advertiser’s payment, and it keeps whatever is left after paying the publisher.

What Is Taboola?

Taboola is an online advertising technology company, listed in the U.S. under the ticker TBLA. It was founded in Israel in 2007 and is headquartered in New York, with offices in locations including Tel Aviv, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Netherlands.

Its products are recommendation widgets, the blocks of thumbnails and headlines that sit below or beside an article under titles such as “Content You May Like,” “You May Also Like” or “Recommended for You.” Each tile links to an article, a video, an image slideshow or a product page. Some of those links lead elsewhere on the same publisher’s site. Others are paid placements that send the reader to an advertiser.

Founder Adam Singolda has described the idea through three ways people find content. They search when they know what they want and can type it. They follow social links when a friend shares something. They also come across content by chance: a reader finishes a page and wonders what to look at next. Taboola was built for that third case. A search engine answers a query the user has typed. Taboola works the other way round: it pushes content to people based on signals about what they are likely to engage with, and its algorithms choose which recommendation fills each slot.

The Three Sides of Taboola’s Marketplace

Taboola’s business works as a marketplace with three participants:

• Advertisers (content creators). Brands, retailers, media companies and marketers that want visitors on their own sites and are willing to pay for them. Their links appear in the widgets.
• Publishers. Website and app owners that place a Taboola widget on their pages and get paid for displaying the paid links. Publishers that have used Taboola include Business Insider, MSN, Yahoo and USA Today.
• Taboola. The platform that connects the two sides. It supplies the widget technology, matches each recommendation to a reader, tracks clicks and engagement, bills advertisers and pays publishers.

The roles can overlap. A news site can be a publisher that earns money from Taboola widgets on its pages and also an advertiser that pays Taboola to promote its own articles across other sites. Whether a company is an advertiser, a publisher or both depends on its own business model.

Publishers decide where the widget goes on their own pages. Taboola’s technology decides which recommendations appear inside it for each visitor. Linked content can be internal (other pages from the same publisher or network, which keeps readers on the site) or external (paid links to advertisers’ sites). The publisher’s revenue share comes from the external, paid links.

How the Money Moves

Taboola’s revenue process comes down to three steps:

1. Sell traffic to advertisers. Advertisers set up campaigns and pay for the visits Taboola delivers to their landing pages.
2. Buy placement from publishers. Taboola secures widget space on publisher sites and apps and pays those publishers a share of the advertising revenue the space generates.
3. Run the matching technology in between. Taboola’s systems decide in real time which recommendation to show, then track clicks, payouts, content quality and user engagement. Better matching means more clicks, which means more revenue for every party.

Taboola does not publicly disclose the percentage it pays publishers, and estimates of it are speculative.

A worked example (hypothetical numbers)

The figures below are invented to show the mechanics. They are not Taboola’s prices or its publisher terms.

Assume an advertiser runs a campaign paying $0.50 per click. Its links are shown on a group of publisher sites and receive 10,000 clicks in a month. Assume the publishers’ share of the revenue is 60%.

• Advertiser spend (Taboola’s revenue): 10,000 × $0.50 = $5,000
• Paid to publishers (traffic acquisition cost): 60% × $5,000 = $3,000
• Left for Taboola before its own operating costs: $5,000 − $3,000 = $2,000

Taboola then pays its staff, data centers, sales teams and other operating expenses out of that $2,000. If the publisher share in this example were higher, or the advertiser’s price per click lower, Taboola’s slice would shrink even though the click volume stayed the same.

Revenue, TAC and ex-TAC Gross Profit

The example explains why Taboola’s headline revenue overstates what the company keeps. Taboola reports advertiser spending as revenue and records publisher payments as a cost, called traffic acquisition cost (TAC). Most of each advertising dollar passes through to publishers.

For that reason the company highlights a metric called ex-TAC gross profit in its results:

Ex-TAC gross profit = Revenue − Traffic acquisition costs (and certain other cost of revenue items, as Taboola defines them in its filings)

Ex-TAC gross profit is roughly the money Taboola earns for running the marketplace. Two companies with the same revenue can have very different businesses underneath if one pays out a much larger share to publishers. When reading Taboola’s earnings, revenue shows the total ad spending flowing through the platform. Ex-TAC gross profit and net income show what is left for Taboola and its shareholders.

On the bottom line, Taboola’s 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025 reported net income of $42.3 million. The company’s results have not always been profitable. It has reported net losses in some quarters, so quarterly figures can swing either way.

What Drives Taboola’s Revenue

Under the marketplace model, a few factors move revenue up or down:

• Supply of publisher inventory. More widgets on high-traffic sites mean more opportunities to show paid recommendations. Long-term publisher deals matter a great deal. In 2023, for example, Taboola signed a long-term agreement to power native advertising across Yahoo’s properties.
• Reader traffic on those sites. Taboola has pointed to growth in visitors to its publisher sites as a driver of results. When publishers lose traffic, Taboola has fewer impressions to sell.
• Advertiser demand and pricing. The more advertisers compete for the same placements, and the more value they get from each click, the more they are willing to pay.
• Recommendation quality. Better matching between readers and recommendations raises click-through rates, which raises earnings per impression for both Taboola and its publishers. The company has cited its use of AI to increase engagement as a growth driver.
• The publisher share. Because publishers are paid from advertiser spending, any change in revenue-share terms directly changes how much of each dollar Taboola keeps.

How Taboola Developed

Taboola has been in business since 2007. Its model widened from video into text and mobile over its first several years:

• 2007: Taboola was founded and focused on video-to-video (V2V) recommendations, which suggest the next video after a viewer finishes one. Video was the harder problem at the time because it is a more complex content type to analyze than text. The company raised $1.5 million from Evergreen Venture Partners in its launch year.
• 2008: A further $4.5 million funding round followed.
• 2010: Taboola expanded beyond pure V2V into text-to-video recommendations and grew quickly, signing clients including Bloomberg, The Huffington Post and The New York Times.
• 2011 to 2013: Additional investment rounds from multiple investors funded further expansion.
• 2013: Taboola began recommending articles, moving from video to text and slideshow content, and introduced its mobile apps late in the year.
• 2021: Taboola became a publicly traded company on Nasdaq through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

Scale of the Business

Taboola describes its reach with company-reported figures. It says it employs more than 1,700 people, reaches more than 500 million daily active users, and works with about 9,000 publishers and more than 15,000 advertisers. Its 10-K states that its infrastructure served up to 1.2 trillion recommendations a month as of December 31, 2025.

Challenges for the Business Model

Recommendation advertising carries risks that bear directly on how much money Taboola can make:

• Reader perception. Many users see sponsored recommendation widgets as unwanted or spammy, which can hurt engagement and the publisher’s brand.
• Publisher reluctance. Publishers are being asked to send visitors away to other websites. Taboola has addressed this partly by mixing paid external links with links to the publisher’s own content and network, so the widget also keeps readers on site.
• Low-quality advertisers. Recommended links have drawn frequent complaints for leading to misleading, distasteful or even malicious destinations. Clickbait images and headlines promoting irrelevant products have been a long-running criticism of the whole category.
• Behavior gaps. People often click on things online, such as weight-loss or get-rich-quick headlines, that they would never seek out offline. That can drive clicks in the short term while eroding trust over time.

Taboola’s responses include algorithm changes aimed at better content quality, a mandatory sponsored-content disclosure displayed with paid links, and tools that let readers filter out recommendations they do not want to see. These matter financially. If publishers decide the widgets cost them more in reader goodwill than they earn, or if advertisers see poor results, both sides of the marketplace shrink.

Competition

Taboola competes for the same advertiser budgets and publisher page space as several other ad platforms:

• Outbrain. The closest rival, with a very similar model of recommendation widgets on publisher sites. Outbrain started with text-based contextual recommendations and now covers text, image and video, the same ground as Taboola.
• Google AdSense. Google’s contextual ad network pays publishers for displaying ads matched to page content. It is popular with publishers and advertisers for its tight controls, relevant ad matching and payouts.
• Facebook (Meta) ads. Meta’s ad system can reach users on Facebook, other Meta platforms and third-party mobile apps.
• Yahoo ads. Yahoo’s ad products can also reach audiences beyond Yahoo’s own properties.

Online advertising also has low barriers to entry for new technology. A rival with better matching, better publisher terms or better quality controls could take inventory or advertiser spending away from Taboola quickly.

The Bottom Line

Taboola earns its money as the middleman in a three-way trade, keeping the difference between what advertisers pay for clicks and what publishers receive for their page space. Its results depend on keeping both sides satisfied: publishers need enough revenue to justify the widgets, and advertisers need enough useful traffic to justify the cost.