Taboola & Outbrain: $850 Million Merger

[Ryuzaki]

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You know both of these as "native advertising" companies. That was always a giant misnomer, but whatever, they kill it. Zergnet is better at it, if you ask me, but these two are definitely the monsters. You typically see them at the bottom of posts, acting as "similar content" blocks where you'd send users to other posts in the same category. Except here you send them off site and receive a CPC payment for the click.

Well, these "content recommendation engines" have just inked the deal to merge under the name Taboola, providing Taboola with a 70% stake while paying Outbrain shareholders $250 million plus a 30% stake. The new company will be valued at $2 billion. The numbers crunch out to (30% of $2 billion = $600 million + $250 million payout = $850 million merger).

The Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda will act as lead for the ~2,250 employees in New York, Tel Aviv, and other cities globally.

The merger bumps them up to having placements on over 20,000 properties and exposure to an audience of 2.6 billion.

Both companies were profitable and each clearing over $1 billion in revenues annually. They managed this on investments of $160 million (Taboola) and $194 million (Outbrain). Impressive! Taboola was founded in 2007 and Outbrain in 2006.

This deal has been in the making since 2015, with less serious talk for over a decade.

 

[darkzerothree]

Need to find the requirements to join - Eglibility
Traffic, for example?

I have ressearched Taboola's site for no avail.

 

[Darth]

TBH I tried both a long time ago and found:

1. The ads were totally irrelevant. Maybe it's my niche, but it was all click baity viralnova crap
2. The CPC was also crap, like $0.03c.

But then I also don't get why supposedly reputable and high quality publications have their units running.

I earned much more from Media.net, for example.

 

[secretagentdad]

TBH I tried both a long time ago and found:

1. The ads were totally irrelevant. Maybe it's my niche, but it was all click baity viralnova crap
2. The CPC was also crap, like $0.03c.

But then I also don't get why supposedly reputable and high quality publications have their units running.

I earned much more from Media.net, for example.

^^^ this Times 1000

Collection of junk assets and improperly used monetization data.

I don’t see a value for them other than being an 2nd choice alternative in a big vertical.

 

[GNews]

I thought people really didn't care about these types of companies still. What agencies are offering good rates now?

I dont even put ads on my sites anymore. I look for direct placements, from consumer. All you have to do is feed on vanity of this social media age pretty much to get your own sponsors.

 

[Ryuzaki]

News sites, celebrity gossip sites, viral nonsense sites, they all can get a decent chunk of income from these. Most of the time those kind of sites are one pageview per visit sites with CPC ads (for some odd reason, I'd be going with CPM ads).

With these ad blocks at the end of the content they have a chance to milk another view, except they send it to another site and get paid per click. If you ever see these kind of ad blocks, read the post titles. They're usually a masterclass in short clickbait copywriting. Taboola and Outbrain less so than Zergnet.

So if you have "facebook" type of traffic where people are mindlessly clicking around wasting time, and your traffic only cares about your one post and will then bounce, sucking them in with clickbait works pretty well and can net a ton of money when you're talking about millions of visitors per day.

5,000,000 daily visits * 1.5% CTR * $0.05 per click = $3,750 revenue per day.​

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There's sites doing far more than that number of traffic in news & gossip. It's definitely nothing to sneeze at if you have the right kind of traffic.

 

[bash]

If you run in a niche that is not google friendly or have been banned from adsense that is pretty much the only time these guys are an option.

Viral news/gossip news sites that just recycle TMZ usually run these types of ads.