Taboolacom Ltd

Our Mission

We power recommendations for the Open Web, helping people all around the world discover things they may like, but never knew existed.

Our Company

Taboolais a technology company that powers recommendations across the Open Web with an artificial intelligence, or AI-based, algorithmic engine that we have developed since the Company began operations in 2007. Taboola has also expanded more directly into e-Commerce, allowing its partners with digital properties the ability to use its platforms to display advertising suited to the audiences of those partners’ web sites or other digital services.

We think of ourselves as a search engine, but in reverse — instead of expecting people to search for information, we recommend information to people or enable our partners to use our technology. You’ve seen us before: we partner with websites, devices, and mobile apps, which we collectively refer to as digital properties, to recommend editorial content and advertisements on the Open Web, outside of the closed ecosystems of the walled gardens such as Meta/Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

Digital properties use our technology platforms to achieve their business goals, such as driving new audiences to their sites and apps, or increasing engagement on site — and we don’t charge them for these services. We also provide a meaningful monetization opportunity to digital properties by surfacing paid recommendations by Advertisers. Unlike walled gardens, we are a business-to-business, or B2B, company with no competing consumer interests. We only interact with consumers through our partners’ digital properties, hence we do not compete with our partners for user attention. Our motivations are aligned. When our partners win, we win, and we grow together.

We empower Advertisers to leverage our proprietary AI-powered recommendation platform to reach targeted audiences utilizing effective, native ad formats across digital properties. We generate revenues primarily when people (consumers) click on, purchase from or, in some cases, view the ads that appear within our partners’ digital experiences via our recommendation platform. Advertisers pay us for those clicks, purchases or impressions and we share the resulting revenue with the digital properties who display those ads and generate those clicks and downstream consumer actions.

Our powerful recommendation platform was built to address a technology challenge of significant complexity: predicting which recommendations users would be interested in, without explicit intent data or social media profiles. Search advertising platforms have access, at a minimum, to users’ search queries which indicate intent, while social media advertising platforms have access to rich personal profiles created by users. In contrast, we base our recommendations on an extensive dataset of context and user behavior derived from the intersection of thousands of digital properties and millions of recommended items, including ads and editorial content.

Yahoo Partnership

In November 2022, we announced we had entered into a 30-year exclusive commercial agreement with Yahoo, under which we will power native advertising across all of Yahoo’s digital properties, expanding our native advertising offering. In January 2023 we closed on the various related agreements, including the issuance of 39,525,691 Ordinary shares and 45,198,702 Non-Voting Ordinary shares to Yahoo.

Cost Restructuring Program

In September 2022, in response to macroeconomic conditions, the Company announced and implemented a cost restructuring program impacting approximately 6% of the Company’s global headcount. Restructuring expenses were approximately $3.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2022 primarily consisting ofone-time incremental employee termination benefits and other costs related to the Company’s business prioritization.

See Note 14 of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statementsin this Annual Report for additional details regarding the cost restructuring program.

Connexity Acquisition

On September 1, 2021 we completed our previously announced acquisition of Shop Holding Corporation, which we refer to as Connexity. The total consideration amount of approximately $800 million included retention incentives and is subject to customary purchase price adjustments for working capital and indebtedness. For additional information about the Connexity acquisition, including the issuance of Ordinary shares and the entry of a $300 million senior secured term loan credit agreement to finance a portion of the acquisition see Notes 7, 10, and 13 of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements in this Annual report.

ION Merger Agreement

On January 25, 2021, we and one of our subsidiaries entered into a Merger Agreement with ION Acquisition Corp. 1 Ltd. Under that agreement, our subsidiary merged with and into ION, with ION continuing as the surviving company and becoming our direct, wholly-owned subsidiary. The Merger Agreement and the related transactions were unanimously approved by both the ION board of directors and the Board. The Business Combination and other transactions contemplated by the Merger Agreement, closed on June 29, 2021 after receipt of the required approval by our shareholders and ION’s shareholders and the fulfillment of certain other conditions. In connection with the Merger Agreement, we also obtained commitments for the purchase in private transactions that closed concurrently with the Business Combination of approximately $285 million of our Ordinary shares, of which approximately $150 million was purchased directly from certain of our existing shareholders, primarily from early investors.

Industry Trends

Taboola’s opportunity is to offer advertisers easy access to a curated supply of Open Web publisher inventory in a way that offers significant scale, reach and frequency with better user experience and monetization performance than what they are seeing today.

Advertising Budgets Shift to Digital Marketing. As we have witnessed over the last decade, advertising budgets continue to shift from traditional media, such as print newspapers, magazines and television, to digital channels. No longer a trend, a change in consumer attention to digital properties has become a lasting movement, giving Advertisers an opportunity to reach increasing numbers of consumers at scale with relevant content and precise targeting, thereby driving a higher return on their investment.

Walled Gardens Dominate Digital Advertising Spend. According to eMarketer, more than half of digital advertising budgets are spent within the closed ecosystems of tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon, which we refer to as “walled gardens.” With the proliferation of these walled gardens and the time spent by consumers within them, the Open Web is fighting for user attention and as a result for advertising dollars.

Highly Fragmented Open Web. According to our estimates, Advertisers spent approximately $80 billion advertising on the Open Web in 2023. Because the Open Web is, by definition, highly fragmented, it is harder for Advertisers to access than the walled gardens.

The Technology behind Digital Advertising has become Increasingly Complex. Technologies for more automated and efficient buying and selling of digital advertising have been gaining traction for several years with both advertising buyers and digital properties. The ability to collect, collate and analyze intent data points using AI and machine-learning technology is a key differentiator for Advertisers, digital properties and advertising intermediaries. Data insights can now be used to optimize digital advertising campaigns in ways that were not previously possible. This means that advertising intermediaries who do not have access to data or are not using AI to power their platforms may be at a disadvantage.

Shift from Offline Shopping to Online Shopping and e-Commerce. Online shopping sawsignificant acceleration during the Covid-19 pandemic and growth is expected to continue ~8% annually through 2027 doubling the growth of physical retail over that same period.

Native Format Proliferation. According to eMarketer, native ads - ads that match the look, feel and function of the media format in which they appear, such as those used by Taboola - accounted for approximately 66% of total U.S. display ad spending in 2023. Native advertising is a format that has been popularized by social media and is now familiar to consumers.

Increasing Focus on Privacy and the Disappearance of Third Party Cookies. Government regulators, consumers, and technology companies recently turned their attention toward the use ofpersonal data and related privacy practices. This has led to increased regulation, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, its equivalent in the United Kingdom (commonly referred to as the UK GDPR), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (as modified by the California Privacy Rights Act), or CCPA. In parallel, major Internet browsers, such as Safari and Firefox are already blocking third party cookies and Google has announced plans to completely phase out third-party cookies in Google Chrome during the second half of 2024. These changes pose a challenge for the digital marketing landscape, which currently relies extensively on third-party cookie data for personalization and must adapt to comply with increasing regulation ofpersonal data.

Our Market Opportunity

We believe the Open Web needs a technology partner that enables digital properties to compete effectively with the scale and technological advantages of the tech giants. We believe our recommendation technology is applicable to a wide range of digital properties, including websites, apps, devices, and in the future, connected TVs and other mediums.

Unlike walled gardens, we are a B2B company with no competing consumer interests. We do not compete with our digital property partners for users’ attention. Our motivations are aligned: when our partners win, we win, and we grow together. This win-win mentality applies to our relationships with digital property partners and our Advertiser clients. Our Advertiser clients typically utilize a performance-based pricing model, which means they only pay us after a desired event, most commonly a click, occurs. In addition, our deep relationships with digital properties offer a compelling value for Advertisers, granting consolidated access to Open Web audiences and, thus, reducing the effects of fragmentation. In the fourth quarter of 2023, we worked with approximately 17,000 Advertisers to serve ads to users across the Open Web and reached nearly 600 million daily active users, which, for this figure, we calculated as the average daily number of users that have been exposed to Taboola content recommendations at least twice in the preceding seven days. We and our digital property partners both benefit when users stay engaged with content on the digital property. To that end, we share advertising revenue as well as content-consumption data with digital properties, which they can use to make editorial decisions that best accommodate their audiences’ interests and increase user engagement.

What We Do: Our Recommendation Platform

At the core of the Taboola platform is our AI-powered predictive recommendation engine, which predicts what people may find interesting by employing unique Deep Learning technology and utilizing a broad range of inputs.

In Taboola’s core business, we serve two types of recommendations: (1) editorial, or “organic,” content from the site that the user is currently visiting, in order to engage the user and increase their chances of staying on the site longer; and (2) third-party ads paid for by our Advertiser partners. Our recommendations support text, image and video formats.

We generate revenue by enabling Advertisers to place bids for the right to serve their ads to targeted audiences across the Taboola network of digital properties, including some of the most premium sites in the world. As part of oure-Commerce offerings, we also syndicate our retailer Advertisers’ monetized product listings and links (clickable advertisements) into commerce content-oriented consumer experiences on both the Open Web and within the dominant traditional ad platforms.

Representative Product Implementation

Our Platform for Digital Properties

Through our technology, data and Advertiser relationships, we help digital properties achieve three key goals:

Our Platform for Advertisers

Advertisers utilize Taboola’s platform and leverage our AI-powered recommendation engine to reach their audiences throughout the buyer journey, from building brand awareness to increasing customer loyalty. Using Taboola’s predictive engine, Advertisers can engage consumers at the right time with the right content, using text, image or video formats. Taboola allows Advertisers to run campaigns either directly through Taboola, using Taboola’s campaign management dashboard, or programmatically.

We believe we offer Advertisers a complement to the walled gardens:

Our Recommendation Technology

Our Research and development team has spent over a decade developing our proprietary AI-based recommendation technology used in our core product, solving an incredibly complex problem — how to construct a personalized recommendation feed from millions of available articles, videos and ads, in real-time, when you have nearly 600 million daily active users and need to optimize for diverse outcomes and support multiple pricing models.

Rather than rely on knowledge of what people are searching for or what they share on social media, our predictive algorithms employ unique Deep Learning technology to develop a powerful model of people’s interests across the Open Web. Our technology performs exceptionally well on diverse types of input data, such as text, images and video, and is designed to discover non-trivial relations between content and users in a specific context. We predict which recommendations users are most likely to engage with based on a broad set of ‘signals’ that fall into the following categories:

Generating a Rich Recommendation Feed

We serve the majority of our recommendations within a feed that was modeled after widely popular social media feeds and adapted for the Open Web. While the feed format provides a good user experience, it requires technological expertise that is an order of magnitude more complex than optimizing a single ad.

This is both a competitive advantage and a technological challenge that requires our algorithms to optimize multiple placements simultaneously across an entire web page, while also supporting the unique objectives of our various partners. Indeed, any recommendation we generate takes into consideration the other advertisements and editorial content recommendations that we display in the same feed. The effect of the sum of these parts allows us to predict the user engagement in different contexts, and make algorithmic decisions concerning the content we serve the user next.

In order to populate recommendations within a feed, our technology must consider the whole page, and recommend content or ads within the context of that page. This has implications both on the algorithms to predict engagement, as well as on how ad auctions are conducted. We have built an efficient algorithm to estimate the incrementality of new items based on what is already in the feed, and taking into account both how strong the item is standalone, as well as how similar it is to the other items already in the feed.

Additionally, our Deep Learning engine allows us to optimize for multiple objectives simultaneously, which delivers efficacy to Advertisers, increases user engagement and supports the achievement of many other business goals 6in tandem. As opposed to other digital ad intermediaries who optimize the placements of a single ad unit in an environment they do not control, we influence, and more often create, the setting in which ads appear as we control the entire feed of content and ads, and optimize across the entire feed, page or session.

Lastly, we have built a robust ability to conform our recommendation feeds to the design of our digital property partners’ pages and layouts. Presenting a variable mix of both editorial and paid content in this native format also mitigates the risk of user fatigue, commonly referred to as “banner blindness,” that has been noted in traditional display ads.

How We Recommend Editorial Content

Recommending editorial, or organic, content produced by digital properties enables us to help our publisher partners keep users active on their site for a longer period of time, increasing their exposure to more personalized editorial content — thus increasing overall satisfaction and loyalty.

To successfully recommend editorial content items, we developed algorithms that extract and analyze content consumption patterns from our entire network of digital properties. Our recommendations also rely on our deep understanding of reading habits based on our analysis of redundancy, recency, vertical, longevity, relevance device type and other factors.

In order to refine our ability to recommend editorial content even further, we have built multiple crawlers to ingest editorial content, categorize it, and extract named entities and topics using our Natural Language Understanding platform, which transforms human language into a machine-readable format. We also automated the assimilation, classification and generation of creatives, including images, videos, titles and descriptions.

We also take into consideration the optimization of recommendations to support our publishers’ goals, including subscriptions, pages per session, session duration, subscriptions to newsletters and more.

How We Recommend Ads

Recommending ads is particularly complex because the process requires accurately predicting multiple facets of the user’s interaction:

Our ultimate measure of success in recommending ads is achieving the Advertiser’s goals. In order to do so, Taboola’s algorithms are designed to select the right opportunity to engage the right user with the right ad, while at the same time optimizing pricing and selecting the best creative assets to use. Our technology is designed to predict the value of each item and optimize both the advertising creatives and the format mix in each auction.

As described above, in order to make effective recommendations, our technology must first predict a user’s engagement with a given advertisement. When combined with the bid for each item, and the prediction of the conversion, this allows us to calculate the relative value of each item available for recommendation. To create an efficient marketplace, our algorithms support diverse pricing models, including CPC and CPM, and are able to conduct efficient auctions between them in order to maximize available inventory for Advertisers with diverse marketing objectives. We optimize bids for a particular ad, Advertiser, user and context, while factoring in constraints, such as geographic location targeting or audience segment targeting, regardless of pricing model.

In order to assist Advertisers in executing efficient and effective campaigns, we developed a pricing automation tool called Smart Bid. Smart Bid is an automated campaign bidding strategy that utilizes platform data to bid effectively in real-time on impressions that are most likely to lead to conversions.

To maximize the probability of a user engaging with an ad, we support flexible native ad formats that include images, videos, text and interactive elements; we also support specialized elements, such as product price, discount, number of items left in stock, mobile app rating and more. Selecting the optimal ad also involves determining the best version and format of the ad from a very large number of combinations; Taboola does so by running a scalable infrastructure of multi-variant testing, which in turn allows the algorithm to choose the best creative combination efficiently.

How we Enable Digital Properties to make e-Commerce Recommendations

With our acquisition of Connexity, our solutions have expanded to include e-Commerce focused content and monetization solutions for publishers. From a content point of view, we provide publishers with access to over 500 million product listings that are structured into product categories and enriched with product attributes. We syndicate those enriched offers to publishers, thereby enabling them to create consumer shopping or editorial experiences by embedding those product listings as native content within their websites, apps or social media feeds.

There are a variety of implementations in terms of how publishers can access and engage with the content. Technology-savvy enterprise publishers will ingest the entire product listings feed and use their own search engine or content management system to choose how, when and which content to display. Less tech-enabled publishers will call Connexity’s search engine API to retrieve product listing results based on a search query, and then they will publish those product listings within their consumer experience in real-time. Lastly, professional editors or social influencers can use a browser-based editorial tool to hand-pick a specific product to display within their editorial content experience.

In each of those cases, from a monetization perspective, we enable the publisher to seamlessly earn revenue on either a CPC or cost-per-action (CPA) for clicks and conversions that are generated by consumer engagement with the product listings or other retail-oriented editorial content.

To enable these publishers to maximize the success of the commerce content initiatives, the company provides a suite of analytics dashboards that showcase real-time feedback on the performance of each of their product listing or editorial placements. In addition, the company also provides insights into industry trends including visibility into the type of content and products that are converting well across the entire network. These real-time feedback loops and insights are critical inputs that drive publishers’ content strategy and decisions about which products to promote. They accrue significant benefits to both publishers and the company in the form of increased yield and significantly differentiate the solution as the network effect is difficult to replicate.

We are Built for the Open Web as a Complement to the Walled Gardens

In support of our win-win approach to partnerships, our recommendation technology is built to operate differently. Because we power editorial recommendations, digital properties typically embed our code directly on their web page. This means we can serve our own first-party cookie, much like what digital properties do on their own sites and applications.

Our recommendation platform allows both digital properties and Advertisers to control their brand identity within Taboola’s network. For example, digital properties can set “acceptance profiles” to determine which types of Advertisers we will recommend, and Advertisers can target or block selected digital properties. To consistently regulate the quality of our network, we also maintain a public content policy and employ a content review team that reviewed overten million items in the fourth quarter of 2023. This combination of technology and human review is designed to create a consistently high level of brand safety and quality content within our network.

While developing our recommendation technology, privacy is always at the top of our mind. We have long established and adopted privacy-by-design as a central element of our technology, and product design and development cycles, with a strong commitment to ensuring best practices in privacy, security and safety for our partners and users. Since 2017, we have had a designated Data Privacy Officer along with a team of privacy specialists. These specialists are integrated within our Research and development and Product organizations and processes, and consider all facets of user privacy as key elements in the design of any new technology, solution or feature of our recommendation platform. We also perform ongoing privacy impact assessments to monitor potential risks during the product lifecycle and proactively mitigate those risks.

Infrastructure

To successfully deliver optimized recommendations tonearly 600 million daily active users, and 500,000 recommendation related requests every second, we developed powerful software and hardware infrastructures from the ground up.

Our data infrastructure was designed and implemented with several principles to ensure both very high accuracy and high speed to process and ingest every new data input at a very high scale and throughput. This infrastructure continuously “feeds” the predictive Deep Learning models, granting access to rich user history and enabling enrichment of data.

In order to support the massive amount of text analysis, processing, named entities and general semantic understanding, we have built a Natural Language Understanding platform with a large scale knowledge graph. Designed to recognize multiple languages, topics, concepts, named entities and categories for the entire Taboola platform, this platform is built using Deep Learning technologies.

The ability to control the entire feed across multiple canvases is enabled by building state of the art client-side technologies to render and serve a rich feed of content across billions of devices, canvases and user touch points. This process operates within strict SLA and performance constraints, which requires us to develop our technology to work efficiently on low-end and high-end devices and canvases.

As of December 31, 2023, we utilized approximately 12,000 servers; four back-end data centers processing over 100TB of data per day to train our AI engine; and nine front-end global data centers that, together, have served up to one trillion recommendations monthly. We use around 500,000 CPU cores,2.5PB of memory and around 71,000PB of storage overall.

Deployment of our code to the production environment is fully automated and includes execution of tens of thousands of automated tests for each code change, using AI to locate anomalies in the code to prevent errors. This allows our Research and development to develop software quickly and enables us to continuously deliver reliable code and AI models to production. To address the extreme complexity of operating at such a massive scale, we use cutting-edge technologies, such as Tensorflow, Spark, Cassandra and Kafka, as well as highly sophisticated code we developed to allow these tools to meet our scale and reliability requirements.

Our Team

We have assembled a world class team of engineers and data scientists with a business-focused, innovative engineering culture. We have access to top talent in Asia, Europe, Israel, and the U.S., including very strong talent in AI, Deep Learning, high-scale infrastructure and browser-based technologies. We believe our engineering culture plays a key role in our success: we assign business KPIs to Research and development teams so technological decisions and priorities are aligned with business needs; we empower engineers to own features end-to-end, from ideation to full adoption; and we put special emphasis on collaboration. Our engineering culture relies strongly on experimentation and multi-variants testing. We continuously deploy and run hundreds of different AI models, UI variations and optimizations, in effect measuring hundreds of KPIs. We build our infrastructure such that it enables this culture of continuous improvement.

Our Competitive Strengths

We believe the following key strengths provide us with competitive advantages:

Our Growth Opportunities

We drive revenue by growing users and user engagement, and by driving yield, which represents the revenue we can generate per user. We do this byfocusing on the following key areas:

Our Business Partners

We primarily have two types ofbusiness partners: digital properties that use Taboola to drive new audiences, engagement and monetization; and Advertisers, and their agencies, that use Taboola to achieve a variety of marketing objectives.

Digital Properties

Taboola had approximately 12,000 digital property partners in the fourth quarter of 2023, including many premium properties such as Microsoft, NBCUniversal, CBSi, The Independent and El Mundo. These partners value our ability to drive new audiences to their sites, engage their users, and monetize their digital properties, while our data insights assist them in making informed editorial decisions. Our value is evidenced by our many multi-year, exclusive partnerships. As of December 31, 2023, our average contract term length with our digital properties was over two years as measured by contract duration at inception; some of our largest partners have even longer-term agreements. Microsoft is our largest partner. Other than Microsoft, no other digital property partner accounted for 5% or more of our Revenues generated from Advertisers on digital properties in 2023.

Advertisers

We had approximately 17,000 Advertisers working with us directly, or through advertising agencies, worldwide during the fourth quarter of 2023. The vast majority of our Revenues comes from Advertisers working with us directly, rather than via an agency. We support the leading programmatic channels via integrations with leading demand side platforms, or DSPs. Thanks to the effectiveness of our recommendation engine, many of our Advertiser clients are considered “always on,” which means they continuously invest on our platform, rather than running finite campaigns.

Our Advertiser customer base is highly diverse. Some of the verticals we have seen strong adoption in are health & fitness, finance, hobbies & interests, technology & computing, home & garden, shopping and automotive. Our ten largest Advertisers accounted for less than 13% of total Revenues on our network in 2023, with none larger than 3%.

Sales and Marketing

To support our “win-win” approach to working with both digital properties and Advertisers, we employ a global sales team tasked with signing new partners and growing existing implementations. Our team is deployed around the world with sales hubs in Bangkok, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Sao Paulo, supported by regional satellite offices in order to best serve our geographically diverse client base.

Selling to Digital Properties

Our sales teams are responsible for adding new partnerships with digital properties. Once a digital property joins our network, our account management team works with the digital property’s stakeholders to understand their goals, help them reach those goals, and identify new opportunities for mutual growth on an ongoing basis.

Selling to Advertisers

We sell to Advertisers through our global sales team and a “self-service” website. Our sales team onboards new customers, mostly large Advertisers, through direct outreach from one of our international sales offices. Our account management teams provide ongoing guidance and data insights that inform campaign strategies and help Advertisers learn how to maximize their return on investment with Taboola. Advertisers can also choose our self-service platform to launch and manage campaigns. Outside of account managers, we support Advertisers through our online Help Center, in-product instructions, and a large number of video tutorials.

Marketing

To support our global sales force, our marketing team presents at industry conferences and hosts webinars and customer events. In addition, our marketing team invests in public relations, advertises online to build brand awareness and acquire new customers, creates case studies, sponsors third-party research, authors data insight reports, creates marketing collateral, publishes blog posts and creates and sponsors events online and in-person.

Competition

We operate in a highly competitive industry. Our main competition for advertising budgets and digital property partnerships are walled gardens and advertising intermediaries:

Walled Gardens. We compete for advertising dollars with the closed ecosystems of technology companies such as Google, Meta/Facebook and Amazon. In many cases we also compete with those companies, in particular Google, for real estate on digital properties. As described above, unlike the walled gardens, our business is based on a “win-win” model of partnership, where we do not compete with our partners and our goals are aligned.

Advertising Intermediaries. A large number of companies provide a solution to one or more of the steps involved in the buying and selling of advertisements online. These include The Trade Desk, Magnite, PubMatic, Xandr, Outbrain, Plista, TripleLift, RevContent, Teads and others. While these companies may be in competition with us, some are also partners of ours.

When competing for Advertiser business, we compete for budgets based on price, reach, speed, brand safety and performance. When competing for digital properties’ business, we are measured on our ability to generate revenue and support other business goals, such as audience development.

Intellectual Property

Our proprietary recommendation engine and associated algorithms and technologies are key to our success, and we rely upon a combination of trade secret, trademark, copyright, and patent laws in the United States and abroad as well as confidentiality agreements and technical measures to establish, maintain and protect our intellectual property and protect our proprietary recommendation engine and associated algorithms and technologies.

Historically, we have not patented our proprietary technology in order to keep our technology architecture, trade secrets, and engineering roadmap private; however, as of December 31, 2023, we own approximately twenty issued patents. We alsoown registrations forcertain domain names, trademarks and service marks in the United States and in certain locations outside the United States. Additionally, we rely upon common law protection for certain trademarks. We generally enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and contractors, and confidentiality agreements with our partners and clients with whom we conduct business, in order to limit access to, and disclosure and use of, our proprietary information.

Ourproprietary, internally developed know-how is also an important element of our intellectual property portfolio. The development and management of our platform requires sophisticated coordination among many specialized employees. To protect our technology, we implement multiple layers of security and our data protection measures are ISO 27001 certified.

Taboola’s General Privacy Practices

Taboola is committed to protecting personal data and providing users transparency and control over the use of their data in online advertising. We seek to strictly enforce our privacy and data protection policies, knowing this is important to our partners, clients, users and vendors.

Historically, we have not collected data that would enable the direct identification of Internet users. As of December 31, 2023, we used only pseudonymous data about Internet users on our platform to manage and execute digital advertising campaigns. We either collect this data directly from users’ devices or it is passed to us by third parties. We provide consumers with notice about our use of cookies and our collection and use of data in connection with the delivery of targeted advertising and allow them to opt-out from the use of data we collect for the delivery of targeted advertising.

We are members of, or participants, in industry self-regulatory organizations, including the Digital Advertising Alliance, the Digital Advertising Alliance Canada, and the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance. Taboola also adheres to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising, and the IAB Europe OBA Framework. In addition, Taboola is a proud member in good standing of the Network Advertising Initiative, an association dedicated to responsible data collection use in digital advertising, and we adhere to the NAI Code of Conduct for Web and Mobile.

Our privacy team delivers company-wide privacy training, enforces our privacy policies and is integral to ensuring that we consider the privacy implications in all aspects of our proprietary platform. We regularly review and document our internal privacy policies, amend existing policies as necessary, and seek to enforce these policies with our clients, publisher partners and vendors. Our privacy team is also actively involved in negotiations with our customers on data and privacy terms to ensure compliance with relevant laws.

Privacy and data protection laws and regulations play a significant role in our business. Our ability to collect, augment, analyze, use, share and otherwise process data relies upon the ability to uniquely identify devices across websites, and applications, and to collect data about user interactions with those devices for purposes such as serving relevant ads and measuring the effectiveness of ads. Federal, state and international laws and regulations regarding the collection, use and other processing of personal data by advertising networks, Advertisers and digital properties is frequently evolving. This includes those related to the level of consumer notice and consent required before a company can employ cookies or other electronic tools to collect data about interactions with users online. Taboola’s operation of its platform and services is subject to numerous U.S. and global privacy regulations, including, without limitation, the following: the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and ePrivacy Directive, the United Kingdom’s General Data Protection Regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act (as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act), China’s Personal Information Protection Law, South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act, Turkey’s Law on the Protection of Personal Data, and New Zealand’s Privacy Act 2020.

Privacy Regulation in the U.S.

In the United States, at both the federal and state level, there are laws that govern activities such as the collection, use and other processing of personal data by covered companies. At the federal level, online advertising activities and data processing activities are subject to regulation by the Federal Trade Commission, which has regularly relied upon Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act to enforce against unfair and deceptive acts and practices, including alleged violations of consumer privacy interests. The Federal Trade Commission has also started enforcing HIPAA in relation to disclosure of online identifiers by covered entities to adtech companies. In addition, some proposed and recently enacted legislation concerning privacy and data protection has affected and will continue to affect our operations and those of our industry partners. Certain state laws may be more stringent or broader in scope, or offer greater individual rights, with respect to personal data than federal, international, or other state laws, which may differ from one other, complicating compliance efforts.

For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act), or CCPA, increases privacy rights for California consumers and imposes obligations on companies that process their personal data (including device identifiers, IP addresses, cookies and geo-location). Among other things, the CCPA requires covered companies to provide disclosures to California consumers and provide such consumers with data protection and privacy rights, including the ability to opt-out of certain sales or sharing of personal data, including for targeted advertising, and the ability to limit the processing of certain sensitive personal data. The CCPA provides for civil penalties for violations, as well as a private right of action for certain data breaches that result in the loss of personal data. Numerous other states have enacted, or are considering enacting, similar legislation. State laws continue to change rapidly, all while discussions continue in Congress about a new comprehensive U.S. federal data privacy law to which Taboola would become subject, if it is enacted. In addition, laws in all 50 U.S. states generally require businesses to provide notice under certain circumstances to consumers whose personal data has been disclosed as a result of a data breach. These laws are not consistent, and compliance in the event of a widespread data breach is difficult and may be costly.

Moreover, there has been a rise in enforcement action and regulation for data privacy in various sectors. For example, Washington state has passed the first comprehensive state health data law, the Washington My Health My Data Act, or MHMD, which, starting in March 2024, will require Taboola to obtain opt-in consent for processing health data in Washington or of Washington consumers. MHMD broadly defines health data to include data that is inferred from nonhealth data when that information is used by a covered entity, or its processor, to associate or identify a consumer with health data. This broad definition means that Taboola will be limited with what advertising services it can provide in Washington to customers in the health and wellness field. MHMD also provides a private right of action for consumers to sue entities that process their data in violation of the MHMD. Further, the FTC has issued substantial fines to HIPAA covered entities for sharing protected health information with third parties like Taboola for advertising purposes and has released guidance around what kind of online tracking activity constitutes sharing protected health information. This new guidance on the scope of HIPAA applicability reduces the data we can collect on users.

Privacy Regulation in Europe

Our business activities are also subject to foreign legislation and regulation. For example, we are required to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, in the European Economic Area, or EEA, and the GDPR’s equivalent in the United Kingdom, or UK GDPR, which impose strict obligations and restrictions on the ability to collect, use, retain, protect, disclose, transfer and otherwise process personal data (including online identifiers and location data). The GDPR and UK GDPR enhance data protection obligations for “controllers” of such data and for service providers, called “processors,” processing the data. They also provide certain rights, such as access and deletion, to the individuals about whom the personal data relates and we have adapted our services to accommodate such rights. The digital advertising industry has collaborated to create a user-facing framework, which we use as of December 31, 2023, for establishing and managing legal bases under the GDPR and other EEA privacy laws including the EU Directive 2002/58/EC (as amended by Directive 2009/136/EC).

While the UK GDPR currently imposes substantially the same obligations as the GDPR, the UK GDPR will not automatically incorporate changes to the GDPR going forward (which would need to be specifically incorporated by the United Kingdom, or UK, government). Moreover, the UK government has publicly announced plans to reform the UK GDPR in ways that, if formalized, are likely to deviate from the GDPR, all of which creates a risk of divergent parallel regimes and related uncertainty, along with the potential for increased compliance costs and risks for affected businesses. Failure to comply with the GDPR or UK GDPR can result in fines of up to 4% of global annual revenue or €20 million (or £17 million under the UK GDPR), whichever is greater. In addition, some EU countries are considering or have passed legislation implementing data protection requirements or requiring local storage and processing of data or similar requirements that could increase the cost and complexity of delivering our services.

Moreover, legal developments in the EEA have created complexity and uncertainty regarding transfers of personal data from the EEA to the U.S. and other so-called third countries outside the EEA. Similar complexities and uncertainties also apply to transfers from the UK to third countries. For the transfer of personal data from the EEA to the U.S. and from the UK to the U.S., we rely upon the EU’s standard contractual clauses, or SCCs, and the UK’s international data transfer agreement (or the UK’s international data transfer addendum that can be used with the EU’s SCCs). However, SCCs have been subjected to regulatory and judicial scrutiny and the legal bases for cross-border data transfers are constantly evolving. On July 10, 2023, the European Commission adopted an adequacy decision concluding that the U.S. ensures an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the EU to the U.S. under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (followed on October 12, 2023 with the adoption of an adequacy decision in the UK for the U.S.-UK Data Bridge). While Taboola is working to participate in the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and the U.S.-UK Data Bridge, such adequacy decision by the European Commission has been challenged in EU courts, and is likely to face additional challenges. Moreover, although the European Commission has issued an adequacy decision in respect of the UK’s data protection framework, enabling data transfers from the EEA to the UK to continue without requiring organizations to put in place contractual or other measures in order to lawfully transfer personal data between the territories, this adequacy determination will automatically expire in June 2025 unless extended. Further, the European Commission may unilaterally revoke the adequacy decision at any point.

Further, EU Directive 2009/136/EC, commonly referred to as the “Cookie Directive,” directs European Union, or EU, member states to ensure that accessing information on an Internet user’s device, such as through a cookie, is allowed only if the Internet user has given his or her consent. As there were different transpositions of the Cookie Directive in domestic laws across the EU Member States, there are currently different interpretations of what constitutes valid consent (e.g., explicit versus implied consent) across the EU, posing a risk of regulatory divergence and creating legal uncertainty for businesses. The EU also has released a proposed replacement to the Cookie Directive, commonly known as the “ePrivacy Regulation,” to, among other things, better align EU member states and the rules governing online tracking technologies and electronic communications, such as unsolicited marketing and cookies, with the requirements of the GDPR. While the ePrivacy Regulation was originally intended to be adopted alongside the GDPR, it is currently going through the European legislative process, and commentators now expect it to be adopted in the coming years. Like the GDPR, the proposed ePrivacy Regulation has extra-territorial application as it applies to businesses established outside the EU which provide publicly-available electronic communications services to, or gather data from the devices of, users in the EU. The ePrivacy Regulation may impose burdensome requirements around obtaining consent and impose fines for violations that are materially higher than those imposed under the EU’s current ePrivacy Directive and related EU member state legislation.

Privacy Regulation in the Asia-Pacific Region

Our business activities are also subject to legislation and regulation in the Asia-Pacific region. Following the implementation of the GDPR, many jurisdictions have moved to amend, release, review and strengthen their existing data privacy and cybersecurity laws, and there has been a progressive effort in the region to work towards coordination of their otherwise disparate laws. For example, many countries have also sought out adequacy decisions from the EU. New Zealand’s updated Privacy Act and South Korea’s amendments to its Personal Information Protection Act, which went into effect in 2020, and China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), which went into effect in 2021, largely align with requirements of the GDPR. Thailand and Japan’s new similar updates and regulations also became effective in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

While China’s PIPL establishes a regime that is largely similar to the GDPR, it also imposes some stricter requirements. For instance, the PIPL has heightened disclosure requirements and specific consents for processing sensitive personal data and transferring personal data outside of China. The PIPL also mandates security impact assessments under a number of processing scenarios and imposes a data localization requirement on both operators of critical information infrastructure and covered companies that process large volumes of personal data. The PIPL also creates penalties for organizations that fail to fulfill their obligations to protect personal data, with potential fines up to 5% of annual revenue.

In August 2023, India passed the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, or DPDP Act, a comprehensive privacy law with extra-territorial effect that mirrors other privacy laws like the GDPR and puts requirements on data fiduciaries for when and how they can process data and gives data subjects rights to their data. Penalties for violating the DPDP Act can be up to INR 250 crores (approximately $30 million). Taboola will be subject to the DPDP Act upon its effective date, which has not yet been set.

Other jurisdictions, such as Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, are reviewing their existing privacy regimes, with an eye toward similar privacy and data protection developments.

To address this range of developments, Taboola’s privacy and data protection program is largely rooted in the GDPR and ISO 27001 security standards, and any international data transfers from the Asia-Pacific region are governed by direct contractual agreements between the regional entities and Taboola’s Israeli parent corporate entity, Taboola.com Ltd. Otherwise, our privacy team works to oversee compliance with these Asia-Pacific regional requirements and to address compliance with our region-specific clients and business teams.

Human Capital

We strive to create a diverse, inclusive and ambitious environment where every employee can discover and unleash their potential to achieve individual and collective success. Our employees are our most valuable asset.

Employees

On December 31, 2023, we had appr oximately 1,900 employees, the majority of which have been employed by Taboola for over two years (including service periods of persons employed by Connexity prior to Taboola’s acquisition of Connexity). We have approximately 500 employees working in research and development, with an average tenure offour years.

As of December 31, 2023, our employees are not covered by a collective bargaining agreement, except as required by law under arrangements in France, Spain, and Brazil, covering a total of approximately 80 employees. We have never experienced a general strike or similar work stoppage.

Transparency

The ability to be transparent and share and discuss our business challenges and opportunities openly and broadly with all our employees is important to our success. We promote an open dialogue with our employees through all-hands meetings, usually twice a month, which include Q&A sessions with senior leadership. We conduct annual and topic-specific employee feedback surveys which consistently receive 80% or higher response rate. Survey results are shared publicly with our managers and employees. We continue to adjust our investment in human capital based on the feedback from our employees.

Talent Acquisition and Development

We are focused on recruiting and retaining talented employees across the organization, with a particular focus on unique talent in algorithms, product, customer relationship management and many other areas that are critical to our success. We continue to invest to hire and retain top talent in all of our offices, and provide competitive compensation for our employees and a range of flexible benefits, including an industry-leading parental leave policy. Wehave been consistently recognized by Dun & Bradstreet asa tophigh-tech company to work for in Israel in 2023, by UK Campaigns as a 100 Best Places to Work and by Built In as one of the 100 best large companies to work for in all four of our major U.S. officers in 2023: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta. Our strong external reputation led to a quarterly average of over 20,000 candidates applying to work at Taboola in 2023. For new hires, we developed an onboarding program tailored towards their roles and responsibilities. On an ongoing basis, we invest in training and development programs that help our employees achieve their career goals, build management skills and lead their organizations. We have two formal career feedback discussions per year where managers and their employees discuss progress and feedback for each other. We believe in developing and promoting top talent from within: in 2023, approximately 15% of our employees were offered an opportunity for career advancement within the company.

Performance and Alignment

Weseek to implementa “pay for performance” culture that we believe drives superior results. We invest in our workforce by offering competitive salaries, incentives, and benefits. We align the interests of our employees with those of Taboola through a broad-based equity award program, generally with a four-year vesting schedule. Typically, employee bonus plans are based on both personal and company goals.

Wellness and Diversity

In 2020, welaunched a global taskforce that is focused on promoting wellness and diversity within our organization. The task force works with our senior management team to address global wellness and diversity topics and develop relevant initiatives to ensure we continue to build a culture where every employee feels valued, seen, and heard. Wecontinue to have amechanism for employees to anonymously voice concerns.

Throughout 2023, we continued to see the results of our initiatives. With respect to finding top diverse talent, we began by assessing our current workforce demographics by region and business unit, and established goals and guidelines in efforts of diversifying our recruitment funnel at the first assessment stage. We committed to wellness and diversity in recruiting by starting a Diverse Interview Slate Campaign to promote diversity in the interview process and reduce biases, which led to hiring more women managers in technical roles. We further invested in strategic partnerships with employment platforms that provide us multi-pronged access to highly skilled underrepresented talent, who may not currently be on our platform, such as Built-In, Ivy Research Council, and Jopwell. As a result, in 2023, we saw that 45% of our new hires were women and 16% of those women were hired into technical positions.

Within the organization, in 2023 we increased the number of Employee Resource Groups from seven to nine, and each has an annual budget to sponsor programming and events. We also have a mentorship program connecting Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) talent to senior leaders. We continue to have a number of global and region-specific initiatives held to promote a culture of inclusion and belonging - such as, workshops, panels, networking events and communities for various interest groups. We also partner with Gold Enterprises to create robust programming for our multi-year wellness and diversity training plan.

We are committed to building a long-term plan that will help foster a community that is diverse and inclusive, both internally and externally.

Available Information

The mailing address of Taboola’s principal executive office is 16 Madison Square West, 7th fl., New York, NY, 10010 and its telephone number is (212) 206-7663. Our agent for service of process in the United States is Taboola, Inc., 16 Madison Square West, 7th fl., New York, NY, 10010.

We recognize that in today’s environment, our current and potential investors, the media and others interested in us look to social media and other online sources for information about us. We believe that these sources represent important communications channels for disseminating information about us, including information that could be deemed to constitute material non-public information. As a result, in addition to our investor relations website (https://investors.taboola.com), filings made with the SEC, press releases we issue from time to time, and public webcasts and conference calls, we have used and intend to continue to use various social media and other online sources to disseminate information about us and, without limitation, our general business developments; financial performance; product and service offerings; research, development and other technical updates; relationships with customers, platform providers and other partners; and market and industry developments. We intend to use the following social media and other websites for the dissemination of information:

Our blog: https://blog.taboola.com/

Our X feed: https://twitter.com/taboola

Our CEO, Adam Singolda’s X feed: https://twitter.com/AdamSingolda

Our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Taboola/

Our corporate LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/taboola/

We invite our current and potential investors, the media and others interested in us to visit these sources for information related to us. Please note that this list of social media and other websites may be updated from time to time on our investor relations website and/or filings we make with the SEC. We have included our web address and social media and other web addresses in this Annual Report solely for informational purposes and the information on our website and those social media channels is not incorporated by reference into this Annual Report.

The SEC maintains an Internet site that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers, such as we, that file electronically, with the SEC at www.sec.gov.

Executive Officers

Adam Singolda (42) has been the Chief Executive Officer, as well as a director, of Taboola since it began operations in 2007. He also serves as a member of the board of directors of K Health, the healthcare startup he co-founded in 2016. Prior to that Mr. Singolda studied Computer Science at The Open University of Israel and spent 6½ years serving in an advanced cyber technology unit of the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, serving as a research and development engineer and manager. He graduated from the IDF officers’ academy with honors. Mr. Singolda’s experience as the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Taboola makes him exceptionally well qualified to serve on our board of directors.

Eldad Maniv (55) has been the President and Chief Operating Officer of Taboola since 2012. Mr. Maniv leads Taboola’s worldwide operations including Taboola’s sales, professional services, and human resources organizations. Mr. Maniv has spent approximately two decades building technology companies in the United States and Israel, having previously served in executive positions at BMC Software, Zend Technologies, and Identify Software. Earlier in his career, he founded NextNine which was acquired by Honeywell. Mr. Maniv currently serves as a director on the board of directors of Verbit.ai. Mr. Maniv holds a B.S. degree from the Talpiot program at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and served five years as a systems engineering officer in an intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces.

Lior Golan (53) has been Chief Technology Officer of Taboola since 2009 and is responsible for Taboola’s product and technical strategy worldwide. Prior to joining Taboola, Mr. Golan was co-founder, Chief Technology Officer, and Vice President of Research & Development of Cyota, a leader in consumer Internet security. After Cyota was acquired by RSA Security in 2005, Mr. Golan spent two years as Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Strategy of the RSA Security Consumer Division and was responsible for leading the product and business direction of its consumer business. Mr. Golan holds a B.S. degree from the Talpiot program at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and served eight years in an intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces.

Stephen Walker (54) has been Chief Financial Officer of Taboola since June 2020. Prior to that, he served as Taboola’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales Operations from 2015 to 2020 and as the General Manager of Taboola-X product between 2014 and 2015. From 2007 until 2014, he served as President and Chief Operating Officer of Perfect Market, until it was acquired by Taboola. Earlier, Mr. Walker held positions in Idealab’s New Ventures Group and led several of Idealab’s portfolio companies. Mr. Walker has a B.S. degree in Computer Science and Finance from Boston College and an M.B.A degree from Harvard Business School.

Kristy Sundjaja (46) has been Chief People Officer since February 2022. Prior to that she served as Senior Vice President of People Operations for Taboola from 2019 to 2022. Prior to joining Taboola in 2019, she co-founded Exceptional Artists Foundation in 2017, a non-profit organization empowering the disabled community, and remains as its President. From 2012 to 2017, Ms. Sundjaja was the Chief of Staff and the Global Head of People at LivePerson. Between 2009 and 2012, Ms. Sundjaja was the Head of Industry Transformation Teams at New York City Economic Development Corporation. Prior to that, Ms. Sundjaja was an Associate Partner at Oliver Wyman where she worked between 1999 and 2009. Ms. Sundjaja graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. degree in Economics from the Wharton School and a B.S. degree and an M.S. degree in Engineering. She also holds an M.B.A degree from Columbia University.