65. Adam Singolda – the tabula rasa of Taboola

Paleo Ad Tech

Adam Singolda is the Founder and CEO of Taboola, a performance-focused advertising company he started in 2007 after spending seven years as a cryptological engineer in the Israeli Defense Forces.

Today, Taboola is a public company with 2023 revenues of $1.4 billion (and growing nicely), around 2,000 employees in 22 countries, 18,000 advertiser customers reaching 600M daily users. It acquired Connexity (formerly Shopzilla) in 2021 for $800M, expanding its offering into commerce- and retail-focused recommendations and ads. It’s based in NYC and still has a large presence near Tel Aviv, where it was founded.

Taboola took a circuitous route to its present incarnation. As Adam tells Marty in this lively episode, his vision after leaving the IDF was to start a company that was a video recommender system — to the solve the problem, he says, that he never knew what to watch on TV. Initial investors were friends and family and, on one memorable occasion, an acquaintance of his mother’s Adam accosted at a bat mitvah to which he had not been invited.

Adam was always self-directed. Living in Israel as a kid, he tried to start a babysitting and tutoring syndicate and then a short-lived text-based news-and-entertainment alert company he called 24Go. And he had an entrepreneurial family: his father Avi Singolda is a well-known studio guitarist and band leader in Israeli who once played “Here Comes the Sun” with Sir George Martin (“the only time I’ve ever seen him nervous,” Adam says of his father).

The name Taboola came from the Latin tabula rasa (“blank slate”), combined with the “oo” motif from successful internet companies Facebook, Yahoo and Google; and the domain taboola.com was available for $10 in 2007.

The company had a hard time finding a business model, and Adam admits that in the beginning he didn’t know anything about the ad business (a trait shared with many PaleoAdTech founders). At first, he pitched publishers on the idea of paying a fee for a video recommendation engine; then he tried a revenue share from money made from recommended videos. Neither worked.

“I almost shut down Taboola three times,” Adam says. “It’s a very hard moment because you’re very small, when you’re a company of 10 people or 15 people and you know, and nobody else does, that you have money for a month or two. It’s really stressful.”

It was only in November, 2011 when for the first time Taboola allowed someone to pay them to be discovered on someone else’s site that “the revenue started to go up and to the right.” Adam doesn’t name his first client but admits it’s a large publisher we all know (like Forbes, perhaps). The idea of a content-and-article recommendation engine with sponsored links mixed in with organic links was born, and Taboola did not look back.

The company went from almost no revenue in 2011 to $200M in 2014 and is on track to $2 billion by 2024 or so. It charges a CPC (which varies from pennies to dollars per click) or sometimes a CPM and shares some of the revenue with publishers. Its customers are “performance ninjas” who are looking for traffic and action, not upper-funnel branding. The algorithm uses pixels on the advertisers’ pages to see if ads result in actions, which improves targeting. So Taboola functions like a performance ad network.

There were always competitors, including RevContent and Outbrain. The latter and Taboola were reportedly involved in merger talks for years that fell apart near the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020. In 2021, Taboola went public via a SPAC on the Nasdaq exchange at a valuation of about $2.6 billion.

Adam’s goals remain lofty and he admits he’s an optimistic person by nature. He sees Taboola as a content recommendation engine for the open internet (outside the gardens), and the acquisition of Connexity as a way to become the web’s product recommendation engine.

Recent features include Maximize Conversion, which is a kind of autopilot for outcomes similar to Google’s PerformanceMax, and an AI-enabled ad-design tool.