EDGAR 10-K Filing

Company CIK: 1840502
Filing Year: 2025
Filename: 1840502_10-K_2025_0001840502-25-000019.json

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ITEM 1. BUSINESS
ITEM 1. BUSINESS
Our Mission
We empower businesses to grow through performance advertising technology that goes beyond search and social and delivers measurable outcomes at scale.
Our Company
Taboola is a technology company that helps businesses grow by placing ads on publisher sites, mobile apps, and devices, which we collectively refer to as digital properties. We operate outside of the major search and social media walled gardens such as Meta, Google, and Amazon. Thousands of Advertisers trust us to drive growth, while approximately 11,000 digital property partners, including NBCNews, Disney, Yahoo, and Apple, rely on us for monetization and audience growth. Our scale is meaningful - we reach approximately 600 million people a day, gaining real-time insight into what people read and buy. This gives us unique “pulse of the internet” data - which alongside our artificial intelligence (AI) - is our competitive advantage and helps our advertiser clients achieve exceptional returns on their advertising spend.
Taboola began operations in 2007 and our technology provides significant value to both digital property partners and Advertisers. 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. We also provide a meaningful monetization opportunity to digital properties by matching relevant advertising to their audience in real time. 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 performance advertising platform to reach targeted audiences utilizing effective 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 performance AI engine. 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 performance AI engine was built to address a technology challenge of significant complexity: predicting which content, both advertisements and editorial, 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. We are the only independent performance platform that goes beyond search and social, and delivers outcomes at scale for advertisers, leveraging our unique supply, 1st-party data and AI technology.
Industry Trends
We see the following important trends in our industry:
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. Most recently this trend has included traditional media itself being digitally transformed with the rise of Connected TV (CTV), Digital Audio, and Digital Out of Home. The shift to digital brings with it an expectation of enhanced measurability, efficiency and performance overall.
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, Meta and Amazon, which we refer to as “walled gardens.” With the proliferation of these walled gardens and the time spent by consumers within them, other digital properties owners are fighting for user attention and advertising dollars.
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. This is known as the AdTech industry. The ability to collect, collate and analyze user 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 commercially valuable data at scale, or are not using AI to power their platforms may be at a disadvantage.
Shift from Offline Shopping to Online Shopping and e-Commerce. According to publicly available industry research, online shopping is expected to grow ~8% annually through 2027, doubling the growth of physical retail over that same period. This trend has, in turn, driven growth in advertising budgets dedicated to acquiring customers for online shopping properties or promoting growth in online sales.
Increasing Focus on Privacy. Government regulators, consumers, and technology companies recently turned their attention toward the use of personal 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 provide users with more control over their privacy settings 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 of personal data. Google's Privacy Sandbox is an initiative aimed at replacing third-party cookies with privacy-preserving alternatives for ad targeting and measurement in Chrome when users do not consent to the use of third party cookies, relying on on-device processing and aggregated data. Companies with first party data have a major advantage in general, including in the Sandbox ecosystem, because they can leverage direct user interactions for personalized advertising and measurement, while others must rely on low scale signals like alternative IDs, or Google's limited, aggregated insights, reducing their control over audience targeting and performance tracking.
Our Market Opportunity
We believe Advertisers want and need a dedicated solution for performance advertising. Generic solutions that aim to service the entire end-to-end marketing funnel (from brand awareness to purchasing) are not optimized to deliver performance outcomes to advertisers on inventory found outside search and social media platforms. Our opportunity is to offer a highly specialized performance advertising platform to the market that delivers performance outcomes, regardless of format, placement or supply type. On February 26, 2025, we announced the launch of Realize, our new performance advertising platform built to drive results at scale on digital publisher properties outside of search and social media platforms. See Management Discussion & Analysis - Subsequent Developments for further information about Realize.
Based on our internal and external industry data, we estimate there is a $55 billion opportunity for our Realize platform to improve the value advertisers get from performance advertising on generic Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), the highly fragmented advertising technology market, and some social media campaigns. We believe this is our Total Addressable Market (TAM).
This market opportunity exists for three reasons.
1.The AdTech landscape is crowded and complex. Advertisers want scale and results without the inefficiency and inconvenience of navigating a fragmented ecosystem.
2. Many DSPs are prioritizing branding over performance. For example, many DSPs have turned their focus to Connected TV (CTV), which is a medium typically more effective for brand awareness rather than generating performance advertising results. While DSPs are very strong solutions for branding purposes, we do not believe they deliver cost effective performance advertising outcomes when compared to the results advertisers can get on Google or Meta.
3. Social platforms have limitations and many advertisers experience diminishing returns. While social delivers strong early performance, audience fatigue sets in, costs go up, and effectiveness declines. In many cases, this leaves l a majority of advertisers spending more and getting less. These challenges create a massive opportunity-one that we’re well positioned to solve.
Strategic Evolution: From Native to Performance Advertising Beyond Search and Social
Historically, Taboola has been a leader in native advertising. Based on evolving market dynamics and advertiser feedback, we are expanding our focus to the broader performance advertising market. This strategic shift addresses the limitations of native advertising alone and aligns with the demand for comprehensive performance solutions beyond search and social platforms.
This evolution is driven by the recognition that advertisers seek performance outcomes across a wider range of ad formats, including standard display, and require solutions that address the limitations of existing AdTech platforms, DSPs and social media advertising.
To capitalize on this opportunity, we launched Realize-, our new performance advertising platform designed to deliver measurable results across various ad formats and placements. This platform leverages our extensive first-party data, advanced AI capabilities (including Max Conversions and Abby), and established publisher partnerships to provide advertisers with a unified solution for performance-driven campaigns.
Our Platform for Advertisers
Realize, Taboola’s powerful ad platform, is used by performance advertisers to find and convert users at scale. By focusing exclusively on the performance marketing funnel (consideration and action) and not the ‘full’ funnel, Realize provides advertisers with a comprehensive set of specialist tools to prospect for high intent users, and to actively drive these prospects down the funnel and turn them into customers.
Underpinned by advanced machine learning AI that we have trained on unique data over 15 years, Realize offers advertisers a powerful engine for growth beyond search and social.
Massive, direct reach in brand safe environments: Realize reaches approximately 600 million daily active users on many of the world’s most well-known editorial and other properties. All of our supply partners are directly connected meaning advertisers do not have to trace complex supply chains when working with Realize. Advertisers can easily select which properties they wish to appear on based on their own brand safety criteria
Multiple creative formats and tools: Realize supports a range of different creative formats across a diverse set of placements on the publisher page. These formats make it easy for advertisers to re-use existing static or video creative assets they have built for display campaigns or social media. We also provide them with Generative AI tools to easily adapt existing creative or to create new ones from scratch meaning that most every type of advertiser can easily start working with Realize
Advanced Audience Targeting options: Using signals based on what users are reading and how they interact with our network of publishers, we offer advertisers a range of proprietary targeting options that drive down customer acquisition costs by connecting the right ads with the right audience
Our Platform for Digital Properties
Through our AI technology, unique data and Advertiser relationships, we help digital properties develop their audience and grow monetization.
Audience Development: Digital properties using our platform can engage and grow their audience in several ways. They can improve engagement and keep users on-site by leveraging our AI engine, which reaches the right user at the right time with relevant content. Greater user engagement can increase opportunities for monetization through ads, subscriptions and more. Historically, Taboola recommendations have been clicked tens of billions of times annually, with approximately one-third of those clicks on editorial content, keeping users on the same site. Return visits can also be encouraged through our personalized push notifications offering. Additionally, our Taboola Newsroom product delivers unique readership data and actionable insights from across the Taboola network to inform editorial decisions, optimize content strategy, and ultimately attract new users. Further, digital properties can find new users via exclusive distribution channels: they can acquire quality audiences from across the Taboola Network, and they can distribute editorial content across the Taboola News ecosystem to reach users in experiences on mobile devices.
Monetization: We enable digital properties to monetize their content with digital ads in a variety of formats, placements and supply types. When people click on these ads or make a purchase, and in certain cases when they view the ads, Advertisers pay us and we then share in this revenue with the digital property on which the click or impression occurred. For over a decade, Taboola has been a leader in native ad monetization for digital properties, primarily in below-article placements. With the launch of Realize, Taboola’s goal is to provide the opportunity for digital properties to expand their revenues by attracting new performance advertising budgets to their programmatic display and native placements. Realize’s new audience targeting and performance AI capabilities along with expanded ad format and placement offerings in exclusive and bidded environments are designed to provide higher yield for digital properties, while increasing ad relevance and enhancing the user experience. With Taboola’s e-Commerce solution we also offer cost-per-click and cost-per-action monetization of both product listings and links to retailers that reside directly within editorial content.
Our Performance Technology
Our Research and development team has spent over a decade developing the proprietary Performance AI technology used in our core product, solving an incredibly complex problem - how to match personalized ad to millions of available articles and videos, in real-time, when you have approximately 600 million daily active users, exposed to multiple ad impressions a day, 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 and intent across digital properties outside of search and social platforms. 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:
•User Behavior. We are experts in analyzing pseudonymized user behavior across digital properties outside of search and social platforms. We gather a massive amount of first party content consumption data from users who visit our partners’ digital properties, which our Deep Learning engines then ingest.
•Context. Our algorithms ingest contextual signals, such as geographic location of the user, what device the user is using, time of day, day of week, page layout, page language and more.
•Analysis of Recommended Items. We analyze recommended items, including paid advertisements, editorial articles, images and videos, to identify signals such as topic, title, thumbnail image, semantics and sentiment.
How We Match Ads
Matching ads to ad opportunities is particularly complex because the process requires accurately predicting multiple facets of the user’s interaction:
•The probability the user will interact (click on an ad, or go to an Advertiser’s site/app after seeing an ad), given a specific user and context.
•The probability a user will convert (into a lead, sales or other KPIs the Advertiser wishes to optimize) after she clicked/viewed an ad, given a specific user and context.
•The price of a specific item (we support cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand impressions (CPM)).
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 match ads effectively, 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 multiple ad formats, including standard display, video and native formats used on social media and other channels,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
Our solutions include e-Commerce focused content and monetization solutions for publishers through our Connexity subsidiary. 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.
Publishers can access and engage with the content in a variety of ways. 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, we provide a suite of analytics dashboards that showcase real-time feedback on the performance of each of their product listing or editorial placements. In addition, we also provide 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.
Performance Advertising that Complements Campaigns on Search and Social Media
In support of our win-win approach to partnerships, our Performance AI 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 performance 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 over ten million items in the fourth quarter of 2024. 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 performance platform, 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.
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.
Yahoo Partnership
In November 2022, we announced we had entered into a 30-year exclusive commercial agreement with Yahoo, under which we power native advertising across all of Yahoo’s digital properties, expanding our native advertising offering. This agreement also granted us access to standard display placements across Yahoo properties, as well as enabling us to partner closely with Yahoo to serve advertisers utilizing combined data and scale of supply. 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 of one-time incremental employee termination benefits and other costs related to the Company’s business prioritization.
See Note 14 of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements in this Annual Report for additional details regarding the cost restructuring program.
Infrastructure
To successfully deliver optimized recommendations to nearly 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, 2024 we utilized approximately 13,000 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 600,000 CPU cores, 2.8PB 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:
•Performance of our AI Technology. We have spent over 15 years developing our AI-powered recommendation technology to drive high yield for digital properties, high returns on advertising spend for Advertisers, and relevant recommendations to consumers, who spend more time consuming content on digital properties. Similarly Connexity, our e-Commerce solution, uses AI powered technology to drive optimized performance for Advertisers and digital properties.
•More than Monetization. The value we provide to digital properties goes beyond monetization. Our technology helps digital properties grow their audience by optimizing audience exchange programs; recommending content created by the digital properties to increase the time consumers spend on these properties; helping editorial teams make data-driven decisions, and more. We work daily with our extensive network of global digital properties to improve our platform and create more value for the entire Taboola network.
•Exclusive, Multi-Year Partnerships with Premium Digital Properties. We have established long-standing, and in many cases exclusive relationships with digital properties on the Open Web. They have chosen to work with Taboola across all types of platforms, including desktop, mobile and tablet devices. This provides Taboola and Taboola Advertisers with predictable access to audiences and supply.
•Direct Relationships with Advertisers. We work directly with the majority of the Advertisers that use our platform. This allows us to build strong relationships, help Advertisers succeed on our platform, and evolve our technology based on direct feedback.
•High Reach and Scale. We have nearly 600 million daily active users across the globe, enabling Advertisers to run campaigns at scale.
•Network Effect. As more digital properties use our platform, we gather more content consumption data. More data makes our AI-driven algorithms more effective in making predictions, which in turn enables us to deliver better performance for Advertisers, which drives higher yields for digital properties. These higher yields make it easier to retain digital properties and acquire new partners.
•Founder-led Experienced Management Team. Our founder, Adam Singolda, has successfully led Taboola as CEO since we began operations in 2007. Most of Taboola’s senior management has worked together with our founder for many years: the average tenure of our senior management is over ten years, demonstrating strong execution and achieving rapid growth.
•Strong Financial Profile. We designed our business to be highly scalable, with a focus on sustainable long-term development. Since we began operations in 2007, we have demonstrated a track record over time of growth in revenue, gross profit and ex-TAC Gross Profit.
•Not Dependent on Third Party Cookies. Our direct integration with many digital properties has helped us navigate changes in the industry. Our engineers continue to work closely with industry stakeholders to ensure we will be prepared in the likely event that third-party cookies are fully blocked and we continue to invest in innovative solutions that deliver relevant and engaging discovery experiences for our users.
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 by focusing on the following key areas:
•Continued Investment in AI. Continuously investing in our AI technology is at the heart of what we do. We believe AI is critical to engaging Open Web users and will ultimately provide better service and greater monetization to Advertisers and digital properties, increasing our yields and accelerating our growth.
•Grow our Core Digital Property and Advertiser Client Base. While we already have an extensive network of global digital properties and Advertisers, we believe the efficacy of our recommendation platform gives us the opportunity to expand our partnerships and client base even further, as demonstrated by our 30-year partnership with Yahoo which closed in January 2023. We expect to continue investing in our technology, expanding our global presence, and growing our sales and client service teams to support further growth.
•Add User Touchpoints. At our core, Taboola is a recommendation engine. We believe many types of digital properties need a recommendation engine to engage their consumers, find new audiences and monetize. This includes e-Commerce websites, connected TVs, devices and more. In 2018, we launched Taboola News, an offering which seamlessly integrates premium content from our digital properties into connected devices. We believe our existing partnerships with leading device manufacturers and mobile carriers, as well as potential future partnerships with connected TV vendors and others, presents a substantial growth opportunity for both Taboola and our partners.
•Add New Types of Recommendations. From experience, we know recommendation engines become better when they are able to recommend a greater variety of content. For example, in 2016, we predicted that video content presented a huge opportunity for Advertisers to reach their audiences in a highly impactful way, for digital properties to drive better monetization and for users to engage with suggested videos, similar to how they are used on social networks such as Instagram. To that end, we added support for video formats in our recommendation platform and saw significant returns from doing so. Similarly, we believe there is opportunity to further diversify our recommendation offerings and intend to invest in new formats and advertising partnerships to improve both consumer experience and yield. The ability to display a variety of media formats in novel combinations is key to preventing “banner blindness” that plagues traditional display formats and making our recommendation engine even better.
•E-Commerce. We offer e-Commerce solutions through our Connexity subsidiary, which strengthens our data, pairing our readership data with purchasing data that can make our AI better, grow yield and make our advertising partners more successful. Our expansion into e-Commerce aligns with Taboola’s overall business strategy, which is about working directly with both Advertisers and publishers, serving high quality advertising experiences that do not depend on cookies. E-Commerce is also the way for us to diversify what we recommend - to recommend products - and to grow our yield for publishers, which helps us become even more competitive. These new capabilities will provide merchants, and publishers, large and small, more opportunities to scale outside of the walled gardens, making the open web thrive.
•Pursue Value-Enhancing Acquisition Opportunities. The Open Web remains highly fragmented, which may present attractive opportunities for us to grow through strategic and value-enhancing acquisitions. We will continue to evaluate potential acquisition opportunities in light of changing industry trends and competitive conditions. However, given the level of effort we anticipate in launching our partnership with Yahoo, we would expect any acquisitions that we consider to either be small and very simple to integrate or dramatically value-enhancing.
Our Business Partners
We primarily have two types of business 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 11,000 digital property partners in the fourth quarter of 2024, including many premium properties such as Yahoo, Microsoft, NBCUniversal, CBSi, Business Insider, 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, 2024 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. Yahoo and Microsoft are our largest partners. Other than Yahoo and Microsoft, no other digital property partner accounted for 5% or more of our Revenues generated from Advertisers on digital properties in 2024.
Advertisers
We had approximately 2,100 Scaled Advertisers working with us directly, or through advertising agencies, worldwide during the fourth quarter of 2024. We define a Scaled Advertiser as an Advertiser that has more than $100,000 of cumulative gross spend on our network on a trailing four quarter basis. Over each of the last three years, a significant majority of our Revenues came from Scaled 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 11% of total Revenues on our network in 2024, 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, 2024, we own approximately twenty issued patents. We also own registrations for certain 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.
Our proprietary, 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, 2024, 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. and Canada
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.
We have experienced an increased number of questions from clients about laws regulating health data. We already have procedures and policies addressing these new regulations in Washington, however other states, including New York are introducing their own specific laws regulating health data. We are continuously monitoring these legislative changes and will implement any appropriate requirements.
In 2022, the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada introduced a Transparency & Consent Framework for which we are a participant. Similar to the U.S., certain provinces in Canada are taking different approaches to the level of consent required from users and we are continuously working on implementing processes to comply with these changing consent requirements.
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, 2024, 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.
Artificial Intelligence
The AI regulatory landscape is rapidly evolving across U.S. Federal, state, and international jurisdictions. Existing laws, such as those governing data privacy, regulate certain aspects of AI and new regulations are expected to take effect. In the U.S., the Biden Administration's 2023 Executive Order on AI articulates, among other things, certain standards and guidelines for AI safety and security and directs federal agencies to create additional standards and regulations for the use or oversight of AI. At the U.S. state level, the Utah Artificial Intelligence Policy Act entered into force in May 2024 and the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act is set to enter into force in February 2026. In California, the California AI Transparency Act enters into force on January 1, 2026 and California has proposed additional automated decision-making regulations that could potentially restrict or limit the use of AI technologies.
In the European Union, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (“AI Act”) entered into force in August 2024 and will gradually take effect over the next three years. The AI Act established a risk-based governance framework requiring transparency, risk assessments, human oversight, as well as compliance with security and accuracy standards, with potential fines of up to 7% of global annual turnover. In parallel, the European Union in December 2024 updated its Product Liability Directive to specifically address AI and enable claims for damages brought by European Union users of AI systems. We are assessing, and will continue to assess, the scope of application, impact and risks these AI regulations may have on our business.
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, in compliance with applicable laws and regulations. Our employees are our most valuable asset.
Employees
On December 31, 2024, we had approximately 2,000 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 of four years.
As of December 31, 2024, 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 90 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. We are proud to have been consistently recognized as a top employer across the globe. In 2024, we received our first-ever Great Place to Work awards in APAC, with wins across Thailand, Taiwan, and India. This success extended to the U.S. where we earned a Great Place to Work award and were named a Best Workplace in Marketing & Advertising by Fortune, as well as one of the 100 best large companies to work for by Built In in our major offices across New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta. We were also named a Best Place to Work by UK's Campaign and a top high-tech company in Israel by Dun & Bradstreet. Our strong external reputation led to a quarterly average of over 25,000 candidates applying to work at Taboola in 2024. 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 2024, approximately 15% of our employees were offered an opportunity for career advancement within the company.
Performance and Alignment
We seek to implement a “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, we launched 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. We continue to have a mechanism for employees to anonymously voice concerns.
Throughout 2024, we continued to see the results of our initiatives. With respect to finding top diverse talent, we continued assessing our current workforce demographics by region and business unit, and measured our goals and guidelines in efforts of diversifying our recruitment funnel at the first assessment stage. We are committed to wellness and diversity in recruiting with our Diverse Interview Slate Campaign to promote diversity in the interview process and reduce biases, which has 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 2024, we saw that 45% of our new hires were women and 24% of those women were hired into technical positions.
Within the organization, in 2024 we had nine Employee Resource Groups with each having 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, consistent with applicable laws and regulations.
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 CEO, Adam Singolda’s LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/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 (as of December 31, 2024)
Adam Singolda (43) 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 (56) 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 (54) 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 (55) 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 (47) 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.

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ITEM 1A. RISK FACTORS
ITEM 1A. RISK FACTORS
Risks Related to Our Business and Industry
If we are unable to attract new digital properties and Advertisers, sell additional offerings to our existing digital properties and Advertisers, or maintain enough business with our existing digital properties and Advertisers, our revenue growth prospects will be adversely affected.
We must add new digital properties and Advertisers, and encourage existing digital properties and Advertisers to add additional offerings from us, in order to sustain or increase our revenue. As the digital advertising industry matures and as competitors introduce more competitive pricing or differentiated products or services that compete with or are perceived to compete with ours, our ability to sell our solutions to new and existing digital properties and Advertisers could be impaired. In addition, we may reach a point of saturation at which we cannot continue to grow our revenue from existing digital properties and Advertisers because of internal limits they may place on the allocation of space on their sites, allocation of their advertising budgets to digital media, to particular campaigns, to a particular provider, or other reasons. We may also lose revenues if our existing digital properties and Advertisers reduce the amount of business they do with us for any reason, including nonrenewal of their agreements with us or renewal on less favorable terms. If we are unable to attract new digital properties and Advertisers or obtain new business from existing digital properties and Advertisers or maintain enough business with our existing digital properties and Advertisers, our revenue, our revenue growth prospects and business will be adversely affected.
If our performance under contracts with digital properties, where we are obligated to pay a specified minimum guaranteed amount per thousand impressions, do not meet the minimum guarantee requirements, our gross profit could be negatively impacted and our results of operations and financial condition could be harmed.
A significant amount of our revenue comes from contracts with digital properties where we are obligated to pay a specified minimum guaranteed amount per thousand impressions to the digital property. In each of the years ended December 31, 2023 through 2024, our guarantee costs, which we calculate as total payments due under guarantee arrangements in excess of amounts we otherwise would have been required to pay under revenue sharing arrangements, as a percentage of our total payments to digital properties, or TAC, was approximately 19% or less. Although we focus on achieving sufficient revenue per impression through the improvement of our algorithms and using our scale to exceed the minimum guarantees made to digital properties, we may not succeed in doing so. In addition, due to unfavorable macroeconomic, competitive or other conditions, we may be unable to perform as expected under arrangements that provide for such minimum guarantees, in which case our gross profit could be negatively impacted and our results of operation and financial condition could be adversely affected.
We may not be able to compete successfully against current and future competitors because competition in our industry is intense and many competitors, such as Google and Facebook, have substantially more resources than we do. Our competitors may also offer solutions that are perceived by our digital properties and Advertisers to be more attractive than our platform. These factors could result in declining revenue or inhibit our ability to grow our business.
Competition for our clients’ advertising budgets is intense. We compete for a share of total advertising budgets with online search and display advertising, including large “walled garden” advertising platforms such as Google and Facebook, and with traditional advertising media, such as direct mail, television, radio, cable and print. Many current and potential competitors have competitive advantages relative to us, such as longer operating histories, greater name recognition, larger client bases, greater access to advertising inventory on premium websites and significantly greater financial, technical, sales and marketing resources. Thus, increased competition may result in the loss of business or the inability to win new business, which could negatively affect our revenue and future operating results and our ability to grow our business.
We also expect competition on the digital property side to continue increasing as the industry grows. Increased competition may require us to increase the revenue share with our digital properties, charge less for our solutions, or offer other pricing models that are less attractive to us, any of which could decrease our revenues and margins and harm our results of operations.
If the Yahoo partnership is not as long-term financially accretive as we expected our business, operating results, financial condition and reputation could be adversely affected.
If the Yahoo partnership does not receive long-term market acceptance or if Yahoo advertisers terminate their existing contracts or decrease their spend it could result in the partnership not yielding the long-term financial benefits originally expected. Our partnership with Yahoo grants exclusive rights to native advertising on their platform. If the native advertising market does not continue to experience growth or if advertisers continue to shift their preferences to other methods of advertising, or if Realize does not attract enough advertisers to Yahoo’s platforms, the expected long-term financial benefits of the partnership may not be fully realized and we may not continue to generate the cash flow, realize the profitability or increase our margins as expected during the term of the partnership. These factors, among others, may result in the full long-term financial accretion we expect to generate from the Yahoo partnership not being realized, a deterioration of our client relationships, increased costs, harm to our reputation, any of which could materially adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition.
If the launch or implementation of Realize is not successful, if it fails to gain market acceptance, or if it does not deliver the financial accretion we expect, our business, operating results, financial condition and reputation could be adversely affected.
We have invested, and will continue to invest, significant resources in the development, launch, and implementation of Realize, our new performance advertising technology platform. The launch of a new technology platform, including Realize, is inherently risky. There is no guarantee Realize will deliver the value proposition to clients or the financial benefits we currently expect, or at all. Realize's success, and its expected financial benefits to us, depends on several factors, many of which are out of our control, including, but not limited to: (i) the timing and degree of market acceptance of Realize among existing and prospective advertisers; (ii) the degree to which Realize delivers intuitive, simple, and efficient user experience for advertisers to run performance-based campaigns; (iii) the level at which Realize meets the performance objectives for advertisers in delivering outcomes at scale beyond search and social; and (iv) whether our competitors are perceived to offer similar or superior solutions now or in the future that could render Realize less competitive. These risks and others may result in us not achieving the advertiser success and financial benefits to us we currently expect from Realize, a deterioration of our client relationships, increased costs and harm to our reputation, any of which could materially adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition.
Our future growth and success depends on our ability to continue to scale our existing offerings and to introduce new solutions that gain acceptance from digital properties and Advertisers and that differentiate us from our competitors.
Our future success depends on our ability to effectively scale our offerings as our business grows to keep pace with demand for our solutions, and achieve long-term profitability. If we fail to implement these changes on a timely basis, or if we are unable to implement them effectively or at all due to factors beyond our control or other reasons, our business may suffer. We may not be successful in addressing these and other challenges we may face in the future. As a growing company in a rapidly evolving industry, our business prospects depend in large part on our ability to:
•develop and offer a competitive technology platform and offerings that meet our digital properties’ and Advertisers’ needs as they change;
•continuously innovate and improve on the algorithms underlying our technology in order to deliver positive results for our Advertisers and digital properties;
•build a reputation for superior solutions and create trust and long-term relationships with digital properties and Advertisers;
•distinguish ourselves from strong competitors in our industry;
•maintain and expand our relationships with Advertisers who can provide quality content and advertisements;
•respond to evolving industry and government oversight, standards and regulations that impact our business, particularly in the areas of native advertising, data collection, privacy and data protection;
•prevent or otherwise mitigate failures or breaches of security or privacy; and
•attract, hire, integrate and retain qualified and motivated employees.
If we are unable to meet one or more of these objectives or otherwise adequately address the risks and difficulties that we face, our business may suffer, our revenue may decline and we may not be able to achieve further growth or long-term profitability.
If we do not manage our growth effectively, the quality of our platform or our relationships with our digital properties and Advertisers may suffer, and our operating results may be negatively affected.
Our business has historically grown rapidly. We rely heavily on information technology, or IT, systems to manage critical functions such as content recommendation, campaign management and operations, payment from Advertisers and to digital properties, data storage and retrieval, revenue recognition, budgeting, forecasting, financial reporting and other administrative functions. To manage our growth effectively, we must continue to improve and expand our infrastructure, including our IT, financial and administrative systems and controls. We must also continue to manage our employees, operations, finances, research and development and capital investments efficiently. Our productivity and the quality of our platform may be adversely affected if we do not integrate and train our new employees, particularly our research and development, sales and account management personnel, quickly and effectively and if we fail to appropriately coordinate across our executive, finance, human resources, legal, marketing, sales, operations and Advertiser support teams. If we continue to experience rapid growth, we will incur additional expenses, and our growth may place a strain on our resources, infrastructure and ability to maintain the quality of our platform. If we do not adapt to meet these evolving growth challenges, and if the current and future members of our management team do not effectively scale with our growth, the quality of our platform may suffer and our corporate culture may be harmed. Failure to manage our future growth effectively could cause our business to suffer, which, in turn, could have an adverse impact on our financial condition and results of operations.
If we fail to make the right investment decisions in our offerings and technology platform, or if we are unable to generate or otherwise obtain sufficient funds to invest in them, we may not attract and retain digital properties and Advertisers and our revenue and results of operations may decline.
Our industry is subject to rapid changes in standards, regulations, technologies, products and service offerings, as well as in digital property and Advertiser demands and expectations. We continuously need to make decisions regarding which offerings and technology to invest in to meet such demands and evolving industry standards and regulatory requirements. We may make wrong decisions regarding these investments. If new or existing competitors offer more attractive offerings, we may lose digital property and/or Advertisers, or Advertisers may decrease their spending on our platform. New digital property or Advertiser demands, superior competitive offerings, new industry standards or regulations could render our existing solutions unattractive, unmarketable or obsolete and require us to make substantial unanticipated changes to our technology platform or business model. Our failure to adapt to a rapidly changing market or to anticipate digital property and/or Advertiser demands could harm our business and our financial performance.
We have had, and may in the future continue to have, significant fluctuations in our operating results, which make our future results difficult to predict and could cause our operating results to fall below investors’ expectations.
Our quarterly and annual operating results have fluctuated significantly in the past. Similarly, we expect our future operating results to fluctuate for the foreseeable future due to a variety of factors, many of which are beyond our control. Our fluctuating results could cause our performance to fall below the expectations of investors, and adversely affect the price of our Ordinary shares. Because our business is changing and evolving rapidly, our historical operating results may not be useful in predicting our future operating results and it is difficult for us to accurately predict future results. In addition, our rapid growth has limited our ability to reliably track key business metrics and so we have limited understanding of certain aspects of our operations. For example, we do not have good visibility into the seasonality of our business due to the fact that our rapid growth may have masked seasonality. Factors that may increase the volatility of our operating results include the following:
•the addition or loss of new digital properties;
•changes in demand and pricing for our platform;
•the seasonal nature of Advertisers’ spending on digital advertising campaigns;
•changes in our pricing policies or the pricing policies of our competitors;
•the introduction of new technologies, product or service offerings by our competitors;
•changes in Advertisers’ budget allocations or marketing strategies;
•changes and uncertainty in the regulatory environment for us or Advertisers;
•changes in the economic prospects of our digital properties and Advertisers or the economy generally, which could alter current or prospective Advertisers’ spending priorities, or could increase the time or costs required to complete sales with digital properties or Advertisers;
•changes in the availability of advertising inventory or in the cost to reach end consumers through digital advertising;
•changes in our capital expenditures as we acquire the hardware, equipment and other assets required to support our business and potential supply issues in acquiring that hardware and assets;
•costs related to acquisitions of people, businesses or technologies; and
•traffic patterns.
Based upon all of the factors described above and others that we may not anticipate, including those beyond our control, we have a limited ability to forecast our future revenue, costs and expenses. As a result, our operating results may from time to time fall below our estimates or the expectations of investors.
If the use of cookies is rejected by Internet users, subject to unfavorable legislation or regulation, restricted, blocked or limited by technical changes on end users’ devices or Internet browsers, or our ability to use cookie data is otherwise restricted and we are unable to track users in some other way, our performance could decline and we could lose digital properties and Advertisers and, as a result, revenue.
We use “cookies” (small text files) to gather important data to help deliver our solutions. These cookies are placed through an Internet browser on an Internet user’s device and correspond to a data set that we keep on our servers. Some of our cookies are “third party” cookies where we do not have a direct relationship with the Internet user. Our cookies collect information, such as when an Internet user views an Internet site, clicks on an ad, or visits one of our digital properties. We use these cookies to help us achieve our digital property or Advertisers’ campaign goals, to help us ensure that the same Internet user does not unintentionally see the same recommendations too frequently, to report aggregate information to our Advertisers regarding the performance of their campaigns, and to detect and prevent fraudulent activity. We also use data from cookies to help us decide on an opportunity to place a recommendation in a certain location, at a given time, in front of a particular Internet user. A lack of data associated with cookies may detract from our ability to make decisions about an Advertiser’s campaign and undermine the effectiveness of our solutions.
Recently, there has been a general trend among Internet users to refuse to accept cookies on their Internet browsers. All of the most commonly used Internet browsers (including Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge and Safari) allow Internet users to prevent cookies from being accepted by their browsers. Internet users can also delete cookies from their devices at any time. Some Internet users also download “ad blocking” software that prevents cookies from being stored on a user’s device. If more Internet users block or delete cookies more frequently than they currently do, our business could be harmed.
Moreover, technology companies in the Internet browser and operating system spaces, including Google, have announced intentions to discontinue the use of cookies, and to develop alternative methods and mechanisms for tracking users. These web browser and operating system developers have significant resources at their disposal and command substantial market share, and any restrictions they impose could foreclose our ability to understand the preferences of a substantial number of consumers. The Safari, Firefox, and Edge browsers currently block cookies by default, and other browsers may do so in the future. On January 4, 2024, Google started restricting third-party cookies by default for 1% of global Google Chrome users. Unless such default settings in browsers are adjusted by Internet users, our ability to set our cookies in browsers will be more limited, which could adversely affect our business. While Google previously announced plans to completely phase out third-party cookies in Google Chrome they have since announced they no longer plan to deprecate third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. Moreover, mobile devices using Android and iOS operating systems limit the ability of cookies to track users while they are using applications other than their web browser on the device. As a consequence, fewer of our cookies or media partners’ cookies may be set in browsers or be accessible in mobile devices, which can adversely affect our ability to target and measure ads effectively.
Additionally, the use of cookies, as well as the use of the data collected using cookies, is subject to legislation and regulation, and may be subject to further legislation or regulation in the future. The EU, the UK, the U.S. and other governments have enacted or are considering legislation that regulate the level of consumer notice and consent required before a company can employ cookies or other electronic tracking tools.
Although we believe we are well positioned to adapt and continue to provide key data insights to our media partners without cookies, this transition could be more disruptive, slower, or more expensive than we currently anticipate, and could materially affect the accuracy of our recommendations and ads and thus our ability to serve our Advertisers, including through our data marketplace product, adversely affecting our business, results of operations, and financial condition. Limitations on the use or effectiveness of cookies, or other limitations on our ability to collect and use data for advertising, may impact the performance of our platform. We may be required to, or otherwise may determine that it is advisable to, make significant changes in our business operations and product and services to obtain user opt-in for cookies and use of cookie data, or develop or obtain additional tools and technologies to compensate for a lack of cookie data. We may not be able to make the necessary changes in our business operations and products and services to obtain user opt-in for cookies and use of cookie data, or develop, implement or acquire additional tools that compensate for the lack of data associated with cookies. Moreover, even if we are able to do so, such additional products and tools may be subject to further legislation or regulation, time consuming to develop or costly to obtain, or less effective than our current use of cookies.
For information on the regulation of cookies in the EU, see the section titled “Part I, Item 1 - Business-“Privacy Regulation in Europe.”
If Taboola’s ability to personalize its advertisements and content to users is restricted or prohibited due to various privacy laws or regulations or industry changes, we could lose digital properties and Advertisers, which could cause our financial condition, results of operations, and revenues to decline.
The efficacy of our platform for both Advertisers and digital properties relies, in part, on our ability to personalize the recommendations that we serve to Internet users. If we are unable to personalize due to changes in various privacy laws or regulations, the preferences of our publisher clients, or for some other reason beyond our control, the efficacy of our platform may be negatively affected causing our business to suffer, which, in turn, could have an adverse impact on our financial condition, results of operations and revenues.
Our use of AI, and the integration of AI with our products and services, may not be successful, including for predicting what ads and content would be of most interest to our users and for improving on our ability to further predict or optimize user engagement or conversion rates for our Advertiser, and may present business, compliance and reputational challenges, which could lead to a decline in our performance, a loss of digital properties and Advertisers, operational or reputational damage, legal and regulatory risk, and additional costs, any of which could cause our results of operations and revenues to decline.
We utilize AI in connection with our business, including in our platform. The effective delivery of our solution depends on the ability of Taboola’s AI powered platform to predict what ads and content would be of most interest to users so that our Advertisers can achieve desirable returns on their advertising spend. We need to continuously deliver satisfactory results for our Advertisers and digital properties in terms of predicting user engagement and conversion rates in order to maintain and increase revenue, which in turn depends in part on the optimal functioning of Taboola’s AI powered platform. In addition, as we have increased the number of Advertisers and digital properties that use our offerings on a global basis, we have experienced significant growth in the amount and complexity of data processed by Taboola’s AI and the number of ad and content impressions we deliver. Beyond the use of AI in our recommendation engine, in 2023, we launched a new tool for Advertisers to create personalized ads using generative AI. We also may incorporate AI in our business and operations in new and more significant ways over time.
There are significant risks involved in utilizing AI and no assurance can be provided that our use of AI will produce the intended results. For example, AI algorithms may be flawed, insufficient, of poor quality, reflect unwanted forms of bias, or contain other errors or inadequacies, any of which may not be easily detectable; AI has been known to produce false or “hallucinatory” inferences or outputs; AI can present ethical issues and may subject us to new or heightened legal, regulatory, ethical or other challenges; and inappropriate or controversial data practices by developers and end-users, or other factors adversely affecting public opinion of AI, could impair the acceptance of AI solutions, including those incorporated in our products and services.
In particular, errors and defects in Taboola’s AI powered platform may have a significant adverse impact on our business. As the amount of data and number of variables processed by Taboola’s AI powered platform increase, the risk of errors in the type of data collected, stored, generated or accessed also increases. In addition, the calculations that the algorithms must compute become increasingly complex and the likelihood of any defects or errors increases. If we were to experience significant errors or defects in Taboola’s AI powered platform, our solution could be impaired or stop working altogether, which could prevent us from generating any revenue until the errors or defects were detected and corrected. Other negative consequences from significant errors or defects in Taboola’s AI powered platform could include:
•a loss of Advertisers and digital properties;
•fewer user visits to our digital properties;
•lower click-through rates;
•lower conversion rates;
•lower profitability per impression, up to and including negative margins;
•lower return on advertising spend for Advertisers;
•lower price for the advertising inventory we are able to offer to digital properties;
•delivery of advertisements that are less relevant or irrelevant to users;
•liability for damages or regulatory inquiries or lawsuits; and
•harm to our reputation.
Furthermore, the ability of Taboola’s AI powered platform to accurately predict engagement by a user depends in part on our ability to continuously innovate and improve the algorithms underlying Taboola’s AI powered platform in order to deliver positive results for our Advertisers and digital properties that can be clearly attributed to the services we provide. The failure to do so could result in delivering poor performance for our Advertisers and a reduced ability to secure advertising inventory. If failures in Taboola’s AI powered platform or our inability to innovate and improve the algorithms underlying Taboola’s AI powered platform result in Advertisers and digital properties ceasing to partner with us, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to replace, in a timely or effective manner, departing Advertisers with new Advertisers that generate comparable revenue or departing digital properties with new digital properties. As a result, the failure by Taboola’s AI powered platform to accurately predict user engagement or conversion rates and to continue to do so over time could result in significant costs to us and our results of operation and financial condition could be adversely affected.
In addition, the use of generative AI, a relatively new and emerging technology in the early stages of commercial use, exposes us to additional risks. For example, our generative AI-based tool for ad creation, while made available through the Taboola platform, uses software tools provided by third parties and, while we are not aware of any infringement, we do not independently verify whether the content generated using such tools infringes third-party intellectual property or other rights. Further, any content created using generative AI tools may not be subject to copyright protection, which may adversely affect Advertisers’ intellectual property rights in, or ability to commercialize or use, any such content. If we or our Advertisers do not have sufficient rights to use the data or other material or content on which the AI tools we use or offer rely, or the output of such AI tools, we or our Advertisers also may incur liability through the violation of applicable laws and regulations, third-party intellectual property, privacy or other rights, or contracts to which we are party. Any such liability incurred by Advertisers in connection with the use of our generative AI-based tools may also lead to harm to our reputation and a decrease in the use of such tools or our platform by Advertisers.
Regulation of AI is rapidly evolving as legislators and regulators are increasingly focused on these powerful technologies. The technologies underlying AI and its uses are subject to a variety of laws and regulations, including intellectual property, data privacy and cybersecurity, consumer protection, competition, and equal opportunity laws, and are expected to be subject to increased regulation and new laws or new applications of existing laws and regulations. AI is also the subject of ongoing review by various U.S. and foreign governmental and regulatory agencies, and certain jurisdictions are applying, or are considering applying, their platform moderation, data privacy and cybersecurity laws and regulations to AI or are considering general legal frameworks for AI. We may not be able to anticipate how to respond to these rapidly evolving frameworks, and we may need to expend resources to adjust our operations or offerings in certain jurisdictions if the legal frameworks are inconsistent across jurisdictions. Further, because AI itself is highly complex and rapidly developing, it is not possible to predict all of the legal, operational or technological risks that may arise relating to the use of AI.
Our business depends on continued engagement by users who interact with our platform on various digital properties. If users begin to ignore our platform or direct their attention to other elements on the digital property, our performance could decline and we could lose digital properties and Advertisers, which could cause our results of operations and revenues to decline.
Our ability to sustain continued engagement by users who interact with our platform on various digital properties depends on our ability to continue to provide attractive content to users. If users begin to ignore our platform or direct their attention to other elements on the digital property, our performance could decline and digital property and Advertiser satisfaction with our platform may decrease. Technological and other developments may also cause changes in consumer behavior that could affect the attractiveness of our content and ads to users.
While we have adopted a number of strategies and initiatives to address these challenges, there can be no guarantee that our efforts will be successful. If we are unable to demonstrate the continuing value of our platform to Advertisers and digital properties, our results may suffer. A decrease in advertising expenditures by our Advertisers could lead to a reduction in our ability to obtain high-quality content from digital properties, which in turn could have an adverse effect on our results of operations and revenues.
We have historically relied, and expect to continue to rely, on a small number of partners and their respective affiliates for a significant percentage of our revenue. The loss of all or a significant part of their business or an adverse change in the terms of our agreements could significantly harm our reputation, business, financial condition and results of operations.
In 2024, our two largest digital properties, Yahoo and Microsoft, accounted for approximately 32% of our gross revenues generated from Advertisers on digital properties, and our top five digital properties accounted for approximately 40% of our gross revenues. We have long-term contracts with our large digital properties, which, in general, contain minimum guarantee requirements. The typical contract length with our large digital properties is over two years (without any right by these properties to terminate earlier than that absent cause).
The loss of all or a significant part of our business with our largest partners or unfavorable changes in the terms of our agreements with these partners could significantly harm our reputation, business, financial condition and results of operations.
We do not have long-term commitments from our Advertisers, and we may not be able to retain Advertisers or attract new Advertisers that provide us with revenue that is comparable to the revenue generated by any Advertisers we may lose.
Most of our Advertisers do business with us by placing insertion orders for particular advertising campaigns. If we perform well on a particular campaign, then the Advertiser may place new insertion orders with us for additional advertising campaigns. We do not always get written commitment from an Advertiser beyond the campaign-specific insertion order and, even then, each particular insertion order may not be completed since Advertisers can typically terminate a campaign at any time on twenty-four hours’ notice. As a result, our success is dependent upon our ability to outperform our competitors and win repeat business from existing Advertisers, while continually expanding the number of Advertisers for whom we provide services. In addition, it is relatively easy for Advertisers to seek an alternative provider for their campaigns because there are no significant switching costs. In addition, advertising agencies, with whom we do business, often have relationships with many different providers, each of whom may be running portions of the same campaign. Because we generally do not have long-term contracts, it may be difficult for us to accurately predict future revenue streams. We cannot provide assurance that our current Advertisers will continue to use our solutions, or that we will be able to replace departing Advertisers with new Advertisers that provide us with comparable revenue.
We may not be able to retain digital properties or attract new digital properties that provide us with digital space that is sufficient for our volume of sponsored content or comparable to the digital space provided by any digital properties we may lose.
We do business with our partners by allowing them to share in the revenues we receive from Advertisers from campaigns that are placed on their digital properties. If the content we place on the digital property is successful, and the partner is satisfied with our performance and ability to generate revenue, the digital property partner may continue to want us to place content on their website. Alternatively, if we cannot maintain the quality of the content, digital property satisfaction with our platform may decrease. As our Advertiser content may appear on multiple digital properties, any decrease in quality may rapidly affect many digital properties in a short period of time. Our commitments from digital properties are for various periods of time, but our success is dependent upon our ability to successfully execute campaigns using available digital space and maintaining partner satisfaction, while continually expanding the number of digital properties from whom we purchase digital space as needed to meet content volume. In addition, leading up to the expiration of our agreements, it is easy for digital properties to seek an alternative supplier of content for their digital space because there are no fees tied to switching providers. We also face a risk that digital property contract renewals decrease our margins as digital properties may seek to negotiate a higher revenue share. Thus, we cannot provide assurance that our current partners will continue to want us to place content on their digital properties, or that we will be able to replace departing digital properties with new digital properties that provide us with sufficient or comparable digital space. In addition, certain trends in the industry designed to achieve a different user experience may significantly impact our business. For example, a partner may redesign its digital property causing us to have less real estate for our content or placing us in less profitable locations of the website.
If our access to quality digital properties or content from Advertisers is diminished or if we fail to acquire new content, our revenue could decline and our growth prospects could be impeded.
We must maintain a consistent supply of attractive content and quality digital properties on which we place content. If our access to attractive content diminishes, our ability to pay digital properties will diminish, and if access to quality digital properties diminishes then Advertisers may not want to work with us. Thus, our success depends both on our ability to secure quality content and digital real estate.
The amount, quality and cost of supply available to us can change over time. Our digital properties’ contracts are for various periods. As a result, we cannot provide any assurance that we will have ongoing access to a consistent supply of quality digital real estate. Moreover, the number of competitors in our industry is substantial and continues to increase, which could negatively affect the terms of doing business with our digital property partners and ultimately our gross margin. If we are unable to compete favorably for digital properties, we may not be able to place content at competitive rates or find alternative sources of supply with comparable traffic patterns and consumer demographics in a timely manner. Similarly, if we are unable to maintain a consistent supply of quality content from Advertisers for any reason, our business, digital property partners retention and loyalty, financial condition and results of operations would be harmed.
If we are successful in attracting more advertising inventory from digital properties than we can satisfy with demand from Advertisers, our relationship with certain digital properties, our revenues and our business could be adversely impacted.
Our business model depends on our ability to coordinate the supply of advertising inventory from our digital property partners with demand for that inventory from Advertisers. Any material failure to effectively maintain a sufficient number of Advertisers relative to the inventory we have available could cause digital properties not to utilize our platform or impair Taboola’s AI’s ability to accurately predict user engagement. As a result, our relationships with certain digital properties, our revenues and our business could be adversely impacted.
If Taboola fails to maintain the quality of content or to prevent low quality, offensive or other non-compliant content from appearing on the digital properties, we could lose digital properties and Advertisers, which could cause our results of operations and revenues to decline.
Advertiser and digital property satisfaction with our solution depends on our ability to place high quality Advertiser content with content from digital properties that is well-suited to the Advertiser’s product or service. If we are unable to keep our Advertisers’ content from being placed with low quality, offensive or other non-compliant editorial content, or if we are unable to keep low quality, offensive or other non-compliant ads from appearing in our network of digital properties, our reputation and business may suffer. As we grow our business to serve a larger number of Advertisers and digital properties, it could become more challenging to prevent low quality, offensive or other non-compliant content from being shown. In addition, the categories of content that our digital properties accept may change over time and as these categories are removed from our inventory, we could suffer a decrease in cost-per-click and overall revenue. If we are unable to maintain the quality of our Advertiser and digital properties, our reputation and business may suffer and we may not be able to retain or secure additional Advertiser or digital property relationships.
Historically, the majority of our agreements with digital properties have typically required them to provide us with exclusivity for the term of the agreement. To the extent that such exclusivity is reduced or eliminated for any reason, including due to changes in market practice or changes in or in response to laws, rules or regulations, digital properties could elect to implement competitive platforms or services that could be detrimental to our performance, thereby reducing our revenues and harming our business.
Although the majority of our agreements with digital properties have historically required digital properties to provide us with exclusivity for the term of the agreement, there is no guarantee that we will be able to continue to obtain such exclusive arrangements or to renew existing arrangements on similar terms in the future. To the extent that such exclusivity is reduced or eliminated for any reason, including due to changes in market practice or changes in or in response to laws, rules or regulations, our partners could elect to implement other platforms or services on their digital properties, develop their own, or to seek out other third parties with which to do business, which could be detrimental to our performance, thereby reducing our revenues and having an adverse effect on our business.
If we fail to detect fraudulent clicks, including non-human traffic, serve advertisements on undesirable websites, or serve content that is inappropriate to certain of our digital properties, our reputation will suffer, which would harm our brand and reputation and negatively impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.
Our business depends in part on providing our Advertisers and digital properties with a service that they trust, and we have contractual commitments to take reasonable measures to prevent click fraud or distributing content on undesirable digital properties. We use proprietary technology to detect click fraud and block inventory that we know or suspect to be fraudulent. Preventing and combating fraud requires constant vigilance, and we may not always be successful in our efforts to do so. In addition, as we continue to improve our click fraud detection mechanisms, we may find that a portion of our traffic is the result of click fraud, and eliminating this fraudulent traffic would reduce our revenues. We also use proprietary technology to prevent our Advertisers’ content from appearing on undesirable digital properties, but we may not be successful in doing so, which would harm our relationship with Advertisers. Any of these things would harm our brand and reputation and negatively impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.
Our platform and business are subject to a wide variety of risks from individuals from inside and outside our company. Our policies and procedures may be inadequate to protect us from material losses or other harm caused by these bad actors, which could negatively impact our business, results of operations and reputation.
Our platform and business are subject to a wide variety of risks from individuals both inside and outside our company. We have established policies and procedures to manage our exposure to risk, including risks arising from the actions of our employees. These policies may not be adequate or effective in managing our future risk exposure or protecting us against unidentified or unanticipated risks. Although we regularly update our policies and procedures, including with respect to sanctions, bribery, money laundering and insider trading, we may fail to predict future risks due to rapid changes in the market and regulatory conditions and in new markets we enter. Although we have established internal controls to ensure our risk management policies and procedures are adhered to by our employees as we conduct our business, our internal controls may not effectively prevent or detect any non-compliance of our policies and procedures. In particular, these measures may not adequately address or prevent all illegal, improper, or otherwise inappropriate activity from occurring and such conduct could expose us to liability, including through litigation, or adversely affect our brand or reputation. Further, any negative publicity related to the foregoing, could adversely affect public perception of our industry as a whole, which could negatively affect demand for platforms like ours, and potentially lead to increased regulatory or other legal exposure. Any of the foregoing risks could negatively impact our business, results of operations and reputation.
Our business depends on strong brands and well-known digital properties, and failing to maintain and enhance our brands and well-known digital properties would hurt our ability to expand our number of Advertisers and digital properties.
Building and maintaining market awareness, brand recognition and goodwill in a cost-effective manner is important to our overall success in achieving widespread acceptance of our existing and future solutions. In particular, our business depends on access to strong brands and well-known digital properties, such as prominent media outlets, and failing to maintain and enhance our relationships with such brands and digital properties would hurt our ability to strengthen our own brand and to expand our current number of Advertisers and digital properties. Our efforts in developing our brand may be hindered by the marketing efforts of our competitors, to the degree our competitors are able to decrease the number of high-profile digital properties we are able to work with. Alternatively, if a significant number of well-known digital properties ceased to do business with us due to changing market conditions or for other reasons, our own brand image and reputation could suffer and our business and results of operations could be adversely affected.
The widespread use of technologies that can block or limit the display of our ads could adversely affect our financial results and business.
Technologies have been developed, and will likely continue to be developed, that can block the display of our ads or content or block our ad measurement tools, particularly for advertising displayed on personal computers. We generate substantially all of our revenue from advertising, including revenue resulting from the display of ads via our platform on personal computers. Revenue generated from the display of ads on personal computers has been impacted by these technologies from time to time. As a result, these technologies may have an adverse effect on our financial results and, if such technologies continue to proliferate, in particular with respect to mobile platforms, our future financial results may be harmed.
Our business depends on continued and unimpeded access to the Internet and digital properties by us and our users. Internet access providers, device manufacturers, browser developers or owners of digital properties may be able to restrict, block, degrade, or charge for access to certain of our products and services, which could lead to significant degradation of our service or additional expenses and the loss of users and Advertisers.
Our products and services depend on the ability of consumers to access the Internet. Currently, this access is provided by companies that have significant market power in the broadband and internet access marketplace, including incumbent telephone companies, cable companies, mobile communications companies, and government-owned service providers. Some of these providers may take measures that could degrade, disrupt, or increase the cost of user access by restricting or prohibiting the use of their infrastructure to support our platform, by charging increased fees to us or our users, or by providing our competitors preferential access. Some jurisdictions have adopted regulations prohibiting certain forms of discrimination by internet access providers; however, substantial uncertainty exists in the United States and elsewhere regarding such protections. For example, in 2018 the United States Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality rules, which could permit internet access providers to restrict, block, degrade, or charge for access. In addition, our platform may be subject to government-initiated restrictions or blockages. These could result in a decrease of users interacting with our platform, and could impair our ability to attract new Advertisers and digital properties.
In addition, we rely on data signals from user activity on websites that we do not control in order to deliver relevant and effective ads on behalf of our Advertisers. Our advertising revenue is dependent on targeting and measurement tools that incorporate these signals, and any changes in our ability to use such signals will adversely affect our business. For example, legislative and regulatory changes, such as the GDPR and CCPA, may impact our ability to use such signals in our ad products. In addition, mobile operating system and browser providers, such as Apple and Google, have announced product changes as well as future plans to limit the ability of application developers to use these signals to target and measure advertising on their platforms. These developments may limit our ability to target and measure the effectiveness of ads on our platform, and any additional loss of such signals in the future will adversely affect our targeting and measurement capabilities and negatively impact our advertising revenue.
Large and established internet and technology companies may be able to independently transform the marketplace for data and native advertising and significantly impair our ability to operate.
Large and established internet and technology companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google may have the power to significantly change the very nature of the internet display advertising marketplace, and these changes could materially disadvantage us. For example, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have substantial resources and have a significant share of widely adopted industry platforms such as web browsers, mobile operating systems and advertising exchanges and networks. In addition, these or other companies may bundle other services alongside the services that compete with our solutions, thus potentially creating a more competitive platform than ours. Therefore, these companies could leverage their position to make changes to their web browsers, mobile operating systems, platforms, exchanges, networks or other products or services that could be significantly harmful to our business and results of operations.
From time to time certain of our digital properties, typically small and medium digital properties, have, and in the future may continue to, violate the terms of their agreements with us by depriving us of their contractually required advertising inventory.
If a significant number of these digital properties violate their agreements, it could be impractical for us to pursue remedies against all of them and as a result we may lack sufficient or timely advertising inventory for our Advertiser clients. As a result, Advertisers may be less likely to contract with us in the future. The combined effect of this disruption to our anticipated advertising inventory, and related supply and demand dynamics, could have an adverse effect on our revenue, business operations and reputation.
We have already and may in the future invest in or acquire other businesses, which could require significant management attention, disrupt our business, dilute shareholder value and adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations.
As part of our business strategy, we have made and may make future investments in or acquisitions of complementary companies, products or technologies. These activities, including the Connexity acquisition in September 2021, involve significant risks to our business. We may not be able to find other suitable acquisition candidates, and we may not be able to complete such acquisitions on favorable terms, if at all. If we do complete acquisitions, they may not ultimately strengthen our competitive position. Any acquisitions we complete could be viewed negatively by our partners and clients, which could have an adverse impact on our business. In addition, if we are unsuccessful at integrating employees or technologies acquired, our financial condition and results of operations, including revenue growth, could be adversely affected. Any acquisition and subsequent integration will require significant time and resources. We may not be able to successfully evaluate and use the acquired technology or employees, or otherwise manage the acquisition and integration processes successfully. We will be required to pay cash, incur debt and/or issue equity securities to pay for any such acquisition, each of which could adversely affect our financial condition. Our use of cash to pay for acquisitions would limit other potential uses of our cash, including investments in our sales and marketing and product development organizations, and in infrastructure to support scalability. The issuance or sale of equity or convertible debt securities to finance any such acquisitions would result in dilution to our shareholders. If we incur debt, it would result in increased fixed obligations and could also impose covenants or other restrictions that could impede our ability to manage our operations.
If we do not effectively grow and train our sales team and account managers, we may be unable to add new digital properties and Advertisers or increase sales to our existing digital properties and Advertisers, and our business would be adversely affected.
We continue to be substantially dependent on our sales team and account managers to obtain new digital properties and Advertisers and to drive sales from our existing digital properties and Advertisers. We believe that there is significant competition for sales personnel with the skills and technical knowledge that we require. Our ability to achieve significant revenue growth will depend, in large part, on our success in recruiting, training, integrating and retaining sufficient numbers of sales personnel to support our growth. New hires require significant training and it may take significant time before they achieve full productivity. Our recent hires and planned hires may not become productive as quickly as we expect, and we may be unable to hire or retain sufficient numbers of qualified individuals in the markets where we do business or plan to do business. In addition, if we continue to grow rapidly, a large percentage of our sales team will be new to the company and our solutions. If we are unable to hire and train sufficient numbers of effective sales personnel, or the sales personnel are not successful in obtaining new digital properties and Advertisers or increasing sales to our existing digital property and Advertiser base, our business would be adversely affected. Finally, managing our sales team and account managers, particularly in light of our growth, and enforcing compliance with our sales policies is a challenge for us.
If we do not effectively maintain and grow our research and development team with top talent, including employees who are trained in artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced algorithms, we may be unable to continue to improve on our artificial intelligence, our performance could decline and we could lose digital properties and Advertisers, which could cause our results of operations and revenues to decline.
Our future success depends on our ability to continue to attract, retain and motivate highly skilled employees, software engineers and other employees with the technical skills in artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced algorithms that will enable us to deliver effective advertising and content solutions. Competition for highly skilled employees in our industry is intense, particularly in the fields of artificial intelligence and data science. We expect certain of our key competitors, who generally are larger than us and have access to more substantial resources, to pursue top talent even more aggressively.
We may be unable to attract or retain such highly skilled personnel who are critical to our success, which could hinder our ability to keep pace with innovation and technological change in our industry or result in harm to our key Advertiser and digital property relationships, loss of key information, expertise or proprietary knowledge and unanticipated recruitment and training costs. The loss of the services of such key employees could make it more difficult to successfully operate our business and pursue our business goals.
Our growth depends, in part, on the success of our strategic relationships with third parties, including ready access to hardware in key locations to facilitate the delivery of our platform and reliable management of Internet traffic. Supply disruptions can impede our operations, ability to grow and financial performance and also result in significant cost increases.
We anticipate that we will continue to depend on various third-party relationships in order to grow our business. We continue to pursue additional relationships with third parties, such as technology and content providers, content delivery networks, data partnerships, co-location facilities and other strategic partners. Identifying, negotiating and documenting relationships with third parties requires significant time and resources, as does integrating third-party data and services. Our agreements with providers of technology, computer hardware, co-location facilities, and content are typically non-exclusive, do not prohibit them from working with our competitors or from offering competing services and do not typically have minimum purchase commitments. Our competitors may be effective in providing incentives to third parties to favor their products or services over ours or to otherwise prevent or reduce purchases of our solutions. In addition, these third parties may go out of business, no longer offer their services to us or not perform as expected under our agreements with them, and we may have disagreements or disputes with such third parties, which could negatively affect our brand and reputation.
In particular, our continued growth depends on our ability to source computer hardware, including servers built to our specifications, and the ability to locate those servers and related hardware in co-location facilities in the most desirable locations to facilitate the timely delivery of our services. Disruptions in the services provided at co-location facilities that we rely upon can degrade the level of services that we can provide, which could harm our business. We also rely on our integration with many third-party technology providers to execute our business on a daily basis. We rely on a third-party domain name service, or DNS, to direct traffic to our closest data center for efficient processing. If our DNS provider experiences disruptions or performance problems, this could result in inefficient balancing of traffic across our servers as well as impairing or preventing web browser connectivity to our site, which could harm our business.
Supply disruptions could materially impede our growth and our ability to maintain our existing platform. Disruptions in supply can be caused by many factors, including decreases in manufacturing output and labor shortages; the availability of one or more components including semiconductors which are currently in short supply; the impacts of pent up demand; transportation and delivery issues; geopolitical issues; and other circumstances. Such disruptions can result in the delay or inability to obtain necessary hardware, or significant cost increases, any of which could have a material adverse effect on our existing business, our ability to grow and our financial performance.
Our future success depends on the continuing efforts of our key employees, including our founder, and on our ability to hire, train, motivate and retain additional employees, including key employees.
Our future success depends heavily upon the continuing services of our key employees, including our founder and CEO, Adam Singolda, and on our ability to attract and retain members of our management team and other highly skilled employees, including software engineers, analytics and operations employees and sales professionals. The market for talent in our key areas of operations, including Bangkok, California, New York, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv, and London, is intensely competitive. Our competitors may provide more generous benefits, more diverse opportunities and better chances for career advancement than we do. Some of these advantages may be more appealing to high-quality candidates than those we have to offer. Any of our employees may terminate his or her employment with us at any time.
New employees often require significant training and, in many cases, take significant time before they achieve full productivity. As a result, we may incur significant costs to attract and retain employees, including significant expenditures related to salaries and benefits and compensation expenses related to equity awards, and we may lose new employees to our competitors or other companies before we realize the benefit of our investment in recruiting and training them. Moreover, new employees may not be or become as productive as we expect, as we may face challenges in adequately or appropriately integrating them into our workforce and culture. In addition, as we move into new geographies, we will need to attract and recruit skilled employees in those areas.
Even if we are successful in hiring qualified new employees, we may be subject to allegations that we have improperly solicited such employees while they remained employed by our competitors, that such employees have improperly solicited other colleagues of theirs employed by the same competitors or that such employees have divulged proprietary or other confidential information to us in violation of their agreements with such competitors. If we are unable to attract, integrate and retain suitably qualified individuals, our business, financial position and results of operations would be harmed.
Our corporate culture has contributed to our success. If we cannot maintain a strong corporate culture, we could lose the innovation, creativity and teamwork fostered by our culture, and our business could be harmed.
We believe our corporate culture has been a critical component of our success as we believe it fosters innovation, teamwork, passion for partners and clients and focus on execution, while facilitating knowledge sharing across our organization. As we grow and change, we may find it difficult to preserve our corporate culture, which could reduce our ability to innovate and operate effectively. In turn, the failure to preserve our culture could negatively affect our ability to attract, recruit, integrate and retain employees, continue to perform at current levels and effectively execute our business strategy.
Many Advertisers typically spend less in the first quarter and more in the fourth quarter of each calendar year. Our historical revenue growth has mitigated the impact of these seasonal fluctuations in advertising activity. If our growth declines or these typical advertising patterns become more pronounced, seasonality could have a material impact on our revenue, cash flows and operating results.
Our revenue, cash flow and other key operating and performance metrics may vary from quarter to quarter due to the seasonal nature of our Advertiser clients’ spending on advertising campaigns. For example, many Advertisers tend to devote more of their advertising budgets to the fourth calendar quarter to coincide with consumer holiday spending and correspondingly to spend less in the first quarter. Moreover, advertising inventory in the fourth quarter may be more expensive due to increased demand for it. Our historical revenue growth has masked the impact of seasonality in the past, but if our growth rate declines or seasonal spending becomes more pronounced, seasonality could have a more significant impact on our revenue, cash flow and results of operations from period to period.
We usually incur the cost of an Advertiser’s campaign before we bill for services. Such Advertisers may have or develop high-risk credit profiles, which may result in credit risk.
We usually incur the cost of an Advertiser’s campaign before we bill for services. A portion of our Advertiser-side business is sourced through advertising agencies, and we contract with these agencies as agent for a disclosed principal, which is the Advertiser. Typically, the advertising agency pays for our services once it has received payment from the Advertiser for our services. Our agreements with these agencies typically provide that if the Advertiser does not pay the agency, the agency is not liable to us, and we must seek payment solely from the advertiser.
In addition, contracting with Advertisers who have or develop high-risk credit profiles, subjects us to credit risk. This credit risk may vary depending on the nature of the Advertiser’s business and the Advertiser’s monetization of the traffic generated. Any inability to collect costs we have advanced or other amounts due to us, including write-offs of accounts receivable, could have a materially negative effect on our results of operations.
We often pay our digital properties their share of the revenue generated by an Advertiser’s campaigns whether or not we have received payment from the Advertisers and even if we never receive payment from such Advertiser. In addition, we agree with digital properties on a fixed cost for the digital space but a large portion of our revenue from Advertisers is tied to the performance of the campaign. As a result, our results of operations and financial condition could be adversely impacted if we do not receive timely payment from our Advertisers or if our campaigns do not perform as expected.
Risks Related to Laws and Regulations
We are a multinational organization faced with complex and changing laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, content, competition, consumer protection, and other matters. Many of these laws and regulations are subject to change and uncertain interpretation, and could result in claims, changes to our business practices, monetary penalties, increased cost of operations, or declines in user engagement, or otherwise harm our business.
We are subject to a variety of laws and regulations in the United States and other countries that involve matters central to our business, including privacy, data protection, content, competition, consumer protection, and other matters. The expansion of our activities in certain jurisdictions, or other actions that we may take may subject us to additional laws, regulations, or other government scrutiny. In addition, foreign privacy, data protection, content, competition, and other laws and regulations can impose different obligations or be more restrictive than those in the United States. For additional discussion of privacy and data protection laws and regulations applicable to our business, see “Risk Factors-Risks Related to Laws and Regulations-Legislation and regulation of online businesses, including privacy and data protection regimes, could create unexpected costs, subject us to enforcement actions for compliance failures, or cause us to change our technology platform or business model, which could have a material adverse effect on our business.”
Laws and regulations of the countries and their legal subdivisions in which we operate or conduct business or in which our employees reside, which in some cases can be enforced by private parties in addition to government entities, are constantly evolving and can be subject to significant change. As a result, the application, interpretation, and enforcement of these laws and regulations are often uncertain, particularly in the new and rapidly evolving industry in which we operate, and may be interpreted and applied inconsistently from country to country and inconsistently with our current policies and practices. For example, regulatory or legislative actions affecting the manner in which we display content to our users could adversely affect user growth and engagement. Such actions could affect the manner in which we provide access to our platform or adversely affect our financial results.
These laws and regulations, as well as any associated claims, inquiries, or investigations or any other government actions, have in the past led to, and may in the future lead to, unfavorable outcomes including increased compliance costs, delays or impediments in the development of new products, negative publicity and reputational harm, increased operating costs, diversion of management time and attention, and remedies that harm our business, including fines or demands or orders that we modify or cease existing business practices.
Legislation and regulation of online businesses, including privacy and data protection regimes, could create unexpected costs, subject us to enforcement actions for compliance failures, or cause us to change our technology platform or business model, which could have a material adverse effect on our business.
Government regulation could increase the costs of doing business online. U.S. and many international governments have enacted, or are considering enacting, legislation and regulation related to online advertising to which we are or may become subject, and we expect to see an increase in legislation and regulation related to digital advertising, the collection and use of Internet user data and unique device identifiers, such as IP address or unique mobile device identifiers, and other privacy and data protection legislation and regulation. The regulatory environment related to privacy and data protection is increasingly rigorous, with new and constantly changing requirements applicable to our business, and enforcement practices are likely to remain uncertain for the foreseeable future. Such legislation and regulation could affect the costs of doing business online, and could reduce the demand for our solutions or otherwise harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations. These laws and regulations may be interpreted and applied differently over time and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and it is possible that they will be interpreted and applied in ways that may have a material adverse effect on our results of operations, financial condition and cash flows. For example, a wide variety of provincial, state, national, and international laws and regulations apply to the collection, use, retention, protection, disclosure, transfer and other processing of personal data. While we generally have not collected data from Internet users that is traditionally considered to be personally identifiable data, such as name, email address, address, phone numbers, social security numbers, credit card numbers, financial, or health data, we typically do collect and store IP addresses, cookie IDs, and other device identifiers that are or may be considered personal data in some jurisdictions or otherwise may be the subject of legislation or regulation. Legislation or regulation that reduces the data we can collect may cause us to not be able to track advertising conversions as efficiently or target campaigns as effectively, which may negatively impact our revenue.
Evolving and changing definitions of personal data, within the EEA, the UK, Asia, the United States, and elsewhere, especially relating to classification of IP addresses, machine or device identifiers, and other information, have in the past and could in the future, cause us to change our business practices, expend significant costs to modify our data processing practices or policies, preoccupy management, divert resources from other initiatives and projects, or limit or inhibit our ability to operate or expand our business. Evolving data protection and privacy-related laws and regulations could embolden regulatory and public scrutiny, increase levels of enforcement, and pose risk of sanctions for noncompliance. While we currently take steps to avoid collecting personal data that would enable the direct identification of Internet users, we may inadvertently receive this information from Advertisers or advertising agencies or through the process of delivering our service. Additionally, while we take measures to protect the security of information that we collect, use, disclose and otherwise process in the operation of our business, and to offer certain privacy protections with respect to such information, such measures may not always be effective. Our advertising clients or digital property partners have imposed, or may in the future impose, new restrictions relating to the quickly evolving privacy and data protection laws and regulations with which we must adapt and comply. Our failure to comply with applicable laws and regulations, or to protect personal data, could result in enforcement or litigation action against us, including fines, sanctions, penalties, judgments, imprisonment of our officers and public censure, claims for damages by consumers and other affected individuals, obligations to notify regulators and affected individuals, damage to our reputation and loss of goodwill, any of which could have a material adverse impact on our business, financial condition and results of operations. Even the perception of privacy concerns, whether or not valid, could harm our reputation and inhibit adoption of our solutions by current and future clients and partners.
For more information on the privacy and data protection laws and regulations to which we are subject, see the sections titled “Part I, Item 1 - Business-“Privacy Regulation in the U.S.”, “Part I, Item 1 - Business-“Privacy Regulation in Europe” and “Part I, Item 1 - Business-“Privacy Regulation in the Asia-Pacific Region.”
Potential “Do Not Track” standards or government regulation could negatively impact our business by limiting our access to the user data that informs the advertising campaigns we run, and as a result could degrade our performance for our digital properties and Advertisers.
As the use of cookies has received ongoing media attention in recent years, some government regulators and privacy advocates have suggested creating a “Do Not Track” standard that would allow Internet users to express a preference, independent of cookie settings in their web browser, not to have their website browsing recorded. All the major Internet browsers have implemented some version of a “Do Not Track” setting. However, there is limited guidance, consensus and industry standards regarding the definition of “tracking,” what message is conveyed by a “Do Not Track” setting and how to respond to a “Do Not Track” preference. We could face competing policy standards, or standards that put our business model at a competitive disadvantage to other companies that collect data from Internet users, standards that reduce the effectiveness of our solutions, or standards that require us to make costly changes to our solutions. For example, the FTC has stated that it will pursue a legislative solution if the industry cannot agree upon a standard. “Do Not Track” has seen renewed emphasis from proponents of the CCPA, which, in certain circumstances, requires browser-based or similar “do not sell” signals. If a standard is imposed by international federal or state legislation, or agreed upon by standard setting groups, that requires us to recognize a “Do Not Track” signal and prohibits us from using data as we currently do, then that could hinder growth of advertising and content production on the web generally, and limit the quality and amount of data we are able to store and use, which would cause us to change our business practices and adversely affect our business.
On May 16, 2023, the EU Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a digital marketing trade association, released an updated version of the IAB Transparency & Consent Framework, or TCF, to reflect updated regulator guidance and decisions. While Taboola is a registered vendor on the latest version of the TCF, the TCF remains under review by European courts after the IAB appealed a February 2022 decision by the Belgian data protection authority that the TCF violates the GDPR. The TCF is currently a key tool in the EU ad tech ecosystem for passing on consent and “do not sell” signals, and in turn, facilitating compliance with the GDPR. If the TCF is found to be unlawful under the GDPR, the ad tech industry will need to determine new mechanisms for GDPR compliance, which could affect our ability to serve targeted ads and consequently impact our revenue.
User growth and engagement depends upon effective interoperation with devices, platforms and standards set by third parties across the entire ad tech ecosystem that we do not control.
Technology companies in the Internet browsers and operating systems spaces have announced intentions to discontinue the use of cookies, and to develop alternative methods and mechanisms for tracking users. The most commonly used Internet browsers allow users to modify their browser settings to block first-party cookies (placed directly by the media partner or website owner that the user intends to interact with) or third-party cookies, and some browsers block third-party cookies by default. For example, Apple previously released an update to its Safari browser that limits the use of third-party cookies, which reduces our ability to provide the most relevant ads to our users and impacts monetization, and also released changes to iOS, requiring users to voluntarily choose (opt-in) to permit app developers to track them across applications and websites, that limit our ability to target and measure ads effectively. In addition , Google has announced its intention to disable the use of third-party cookies across its Google Chrome web browser. Based on public announcements from Google, the phase out will be in effect for all users in the second half of 2024 subject to regulatory compliance. This change may force many businesses to reevaluate their marketing strategies.
Furthermore, mobile devices using Android and iOS operating systems limit the ability of cookies to track users while they are using applications other than their web browser on the device. As a consequence, fewer of our cookies or media partners’ cookies may be set in browsers or be accessible in mobile devices, which can adversely affect our business.
As technology companies in such sectors replace cookies, it is possible that such companies may rely on proprietary algorithms or statistical methods to track users without cookies, or may utilize log-in credentials entered by users into other web properties owned by these companies, such as their email services, to track web usage, including usage across multiple devices. Alternatively, such companies may build different and potentially proprietary user tracking methods into their widely-used web browsers. Although we believe we are well positioned to adapt and continue to provide key data insights to our media partners without cookies, this transition could be more disruptive, slower, or more expensive than we currently anticipate, and could materially affect the accuracy of our recommendations and ads and thus our ability to serve our Advertisers, including through our data marketplace product, adversely affecting our business, results of operations, and financial condition.
Potential regulation or oversight over native advertising disclosure standards could negatively impact our business by affecting click through rates, which in turn affects the profitability of our digital properties and Advertisers.
We are subject to complex and changing advertising regulations in many jurisdictions in which we operate, including regulatory and self-regulatory requirements to comply with native advertising regulations in connection with our native advertising offering. For example, in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission requires that all online advertising meet certain principles, including the clear and conspicuous disclosure of advertisements. If we, or our advertisers, make mistakes in implementing this varied and evolving guidance, or our commitments with respect to these principles, we could be subject to negative publicity, government investigation, government or private litigation, or investigation by self-regulatory bodies such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the National Advertising Division (NAD) as well as the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK or other accountability groups. Any such action against us could be costly and time consuming and may require us to change our business practices, cause us to divert management’s attention and our resources and be damaging to our reputation and our business. Moreover, additional or different disclosures may lead to a reduction in user engagement, which could have an adverse effect on our business, results of operations, and financial condition.
We are a multinational organization faced with complex and changing advertising regulation in many jurisdictions in which we operate, and we are obligated to comply with such advertising regulations in connection with the advertising we distribute on behalf of our Advertiser clients. If we fail to comply with these advertising regulations we or our Advertisers could be subject to liability or forced to reduce or suspend operations until we are able to comply, which could reduce our revenues.
We are subject to complex and changing advertising regulations in many jurisdictions in which we operate, and we are obligated to comply with such advertising regulations in connection with the advertising we distribute on behalf of our Advertiser clients. For example, much of the federal oversight on digital advertising in the U.S. currently comes from the FTC, which has primarily relied upon Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits companies from engaging in “unfair” or “deceptive” acts or practices in or affecting commerce, including alleged violations of representations concerning privacy and data security protections and acts that allegedly violate individuals’ privacy and data protection interests. If we or our Advertiser clients are not able to comply with these laws or regulations or if we become liable under these laws or regulations, we could be directly harmed, and we may be forced to implement new measures to reduce our exposure to this liability. This may require us to expend substantial resources or to alter our business strategy, which would negatively affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.
From time to time we are subject to litigation, administrative inquiries and similar governmental procedures, which may be extremely costly to defend, could result in substantial judgment or settlement costs or subject us to other remedies. Litigation and other disputes can also divert management’s attention from our operations and hurt our reputation.
From time to time we are involved in various legal proceedings or government investigations, including, but not limited to, actions relating to breach of contract, intellectual property infringement, competition law or other issues. Claims may be expensive to defend, may divert management’s time away from our operations, and may affect the availability and premiums of our liability insurance coverage, regardless of whether they are meritorious or ultimately lead to a judgment against us. We cannot assure you we will be able to successfully defend or resolve any current or future litigation matters, in which case those litigation matters could have a material and adverse effect on our business, financial condition, operating results, cash flows, reputation and prospects.
We are a multinational organization faced with increasingly complex tax issues in many jurisdictions, and we could be obligated to pay additional taxes in various jurisdictions as a result of new taxes and related laws, which may materially affect our business and results of operations.
As a multinational organization, operating in multiple jurisdictions, including Brazil, China, European Union, India, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States, among others, we may be subject to taxation in several jurisdictions around the world with increasingly complex tax laws, the application of which may be uncertain. The amount of taxes we pay in these jurisdictions could increase substantially as a result of changes in the applicable tax principles, including increased tax rates, new tax laws or revised interpretations of existing tax laws and precedents, which could have a material adverse effect on our liquidity and results of operations. In addition, as internet commerce and globalization continue to evolve, increasing regulation by government authorities becomes more likely. Our business could be negatively impacted by the application of existing laws and regulations or the enactment of new laws applicable to digital advertising. The cost to comply with such laws or regulations could be significant, and we may be unable to pass along those costs to our clients in the form of increased fees, which may negatively affect our business and results of operation. We are subject to regular review and audit by Israeli, U.S. and other foreign tax authorities. Although we believe our tax estimates are reasonable, the authorities in these jurisdictions could review our tax returns and impose additional taxes, interest and penalties, and the authorities could claim that various withholding requirements apply to us or our subsidiaries or assert that benefits of tax treaties are not available to us or our subsidiaries, any of which could materially affect our income tax provision, net income, or cash flows in the period or periods for which such determination and settlement is made.
Our operations may expose us to greater than anticipated tax liabilities, which could harm our financial condition and results of operations, and increase the costs our clients would have to pay for our products.
There is heightened scrutiny by fiscal authorities in many jurisdictions on the potential taxation of digital services, including but not limited to, online advertising, search engine and e-commerce businesses (referred to as DST or alike). The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has issued guidelines, referred to as the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project (BEPS), to its member-nations aimed at encouraging broad-based legislative initiatives intended to prevent perceived base erosion transactions and income shifting in a tax-advantaged manner. Further, for the past several years, the OECD has had a specific focus on the taxation implications of digital services including online advertising, search engine and e-commerce businesses, generally referred by the OECD as the “digital economy.” In the fourth quarter of 2019, the OECD released details on its proposed approach which would, among other changes, create a new right to tax certain “digital economy” income not necessarily based on traditional nexus concepts nor on the “arm’s length principle.” As there has been a lack of consensus among the key members, particularly the United States, several jurisdictions legislated digital tax provisions in an uncoordinated and unilateral manner that could result in greater or even double taxation that companies may not have sufficient means to remedy. For example, a number of jurisdictions, including the U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Turkey, India and other countries have already adopted or have formally proposed legislation to affect the taxation of digital services based on differing criteria and metrics.
The taxation by multiple jurisdictions of digital services including online advertising and e-commerce could increase our tax burdens and compliance obligations as well as our costs of doing business internationally and our worldwide effective tax rate which may lead to adverse impact on our financial position and results of operations.
Further, the taxation by multiple jurisdictions of digital businesses could subject us to exposure to withholding, sales, value added taxes (VAT), levies, and/or other taxes, including transaction taxes on our past and future transactions in such jurisdictions where we currently or in the future may be required to report taxable transactions. We are currently subject to and in the future may become subject to additional compliance requirements for certain of these taxes. A successful assertion by one or more U.S. states or foreign countries or change of law requiring us to pay or collect taxes where we presently do not do so, or to pay or collect more taxes in a jurisdiction in which we currently do pay or collect some taxes, could result in substantial liabilities, including taxes on past sales, as well as interest and penalties. Any such assertion could also create significant administrative burdens for us, discourage potential customers from subscribing to our platform due to the incremental cost of any such sales or other related taxes, or otherwise harm our business. Changes in our exposure to withholding, sales, VAT, levies and/or other taxes could have an adverse impact on our financial condition in the future.
In addition, in October 2021, the OECD released an outline that describes the conceptual agreement between 136 countries on fundamental reforms to international tax rules. The outline provides for two primary “Pillars.” Pillar One is aimed to apply to the largest multinational corporations and replace DST, though the time of its introduction is still unknown. As the Pillar Two model, which provides for a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15%, has partially taken effect in some, but not all, countries for the taxable year beginning on January 1, 2024, with some additional provisions taking effect in 2025, there is still uncertainty as to how the Pillar Two model will be applied evenly during this transition period. While Pillar One is not expected to apply to us, Pillar Two could increase our effective tax rate and adversely affect our financial results.
Our effective tax rate may vary significantly depending on our stock price.
The tax effects of the accounting for share-based compensation may significantly impact our effective tax rate from period to period. In periods in which our stock price is higher than the grant price of the share-based compensation vesting in that period, we will recognize excess tax benefits that will decrease our effective tax rate, while in periods in which our stock price is lower than the grant price of the share-based compensation vesting in that period, our effective tax rate may increase. The amount and value of share-based compensation issued relative to our earnings in a particular period will also affect the magnitude of the impact of share-based compensation on our effective tax rate. These tax effects are dependent on our stock price, which we do not control, and a decline in our stock price could significantly increase our effective tax rate and adversely affect our financial results.
The Israeli tax benefits we currently receive require us to meet several conditions and may be terminated or reduced in the future, which would likely increase our taxes, possibly with a retroactive effect.
Some of our operations in Israel, referred to as “Benefited Enterprise” for 2018 and 2019 and “Preferred Technological Enterprise” commencing with 2020 (in case of taxable income position) carry certain tax benefits under the Law for the Encouragement of Capital Investments, 5719-1959, or the Investment Law. In order to be eligible for tax benefits under the Investment Law, our Benefited/Preferred Technological Enterprises must comply with various conditions set forth in the Investment Law, as well as periodic reporting obligations. If we do not meet the requirements for maintaining these benefits or if our assumptions regarding the key elements affecting our tax rates are rejected by the Israeli tax authorities, they may be reduced or canceled and the relevant operations would be subject to Israeli corporate tax at the standard rate, which is 23% in 2018 and thereafter.
In addition to being subject to the standard corporate tax rate, we could be required to refund any tax benefits we have already received, plus interest and penalties thereon under this program or similar programs we have utilized in the past. Even if we continue to meet the relevant requirements, the tax benefits our current “Preferred Technological Enterprise” receive may not be continued in the future at their current levels or at all. If these tax benefits were reduced or eliminated, the amount of taxes we pay would likely increase, as all of our Israeli operations would consequently be subject to corporate tax at the standard rate, which could adversely affect our results of operations. Additionally, if we increase our activities outside of Israel, for example, by way of acquisitions, our increased activities may not be eligible for inclusion in Israeli tax benefit programs. If the Israeli government discontinues or modifies these programs and potential tax benefits, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.
On November 15, 2021, the Encouragement of Capital Investments Law was amended in order, inter alia, to encourage companies to voluntarily elect for an immediate payment of corporate tax on previously tax-exempted earnings which were earned pursuant to Approved and Benefited Enterprises (the “Amendment”). The Amendment provides a reduced corporate tax payment on Exempt Earnings accumulated until December 31, 2020 that were not yet distributed as a dividend, all subject to certain qualifying terms and conditions. The Company implemented the Amendment and as a result, paid the reduced corporate income tax subject to the dividend distribution in an amount of approximately $4.3 million.
Transfer pricing rules may adversely affect our corporate income tax expense.
Many of the jurisdictions in which we conduct business have detailed transfer pricing rules, which require contemporaneous documentation establishing that all transactions with non-resident related parties be priced using arm’s length pricing principles. The tax authorities in these jurisdictions could challenge our related party transfer pricing policies and as a consequence the tax treatment of corresponding expenses and income. International transfer pricing is an area of taxation that depends heavily on the underlying facts and circumstances and generally involves a significant degree of judgment. If any of these tax authorities were to be successful in challenging our transfer pricing policies, we may be liable for additional corporate income tax, and penalties and interest related thereto, which may have a significant impact on our results of operations and financial condition.
We may be exposed to liabilities under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and other U.S. and foreign anti-corruption, anti-money laundering, export control, sanctions and other trade laws and regulations, and any determination that we violated these laws could have a material adverse effect on our business.
We are subject to export control and import laws and regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, U.S. Customs regulations and various economic and trade sanctions regulations administered by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. We are also subject to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended, the U.S. domestic bribery statute contained in 18 U.S.C. § 201, the U.S. Travel Act, the USA PATRIOT Act, the United Kingdom Bribery Act 2010, the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, Chapter 9 (sub-chapter 5) of the Israeli Penal Law, 1977, the Israeli Prohibition on Money Laundering Law -2000 and possibly other anti-bribery and anti-money laundering laws in countries outside of the United States in which we conduct our activities. Compliance with these laws has been the subject of increasing focus and activity by regulatory authorities, both in the United States and elsewhere, in recent years. Anti-corruption laws are interpreted broadly and prohibit companies and their employees and third-party intermediaries from authorizing, promising, offering, providing, soliciting or accepting, directly or indirectly, improper payments or benefits to or from any person whether in the public or private sector. Although we endeavor to conduct our business in accordance with applicable laws and regulations, we cannot guarantee compliance.
Noncompliance with anti-corruption, anti-money laundering, export control, sanctions and other trade laws could subject us to whistleblower complaints, investigations, sanctions, settlements, prosecution, other enforcement actions, disgorgement of profits, significant fines, damages, other civil and criminal penalties or injunctions, suspension and/or debarment from contracting with certain persons, the loss of export privileges, reputational harm, adverse media coverage and other collateral consequences. If subpoenas or investigations are launched, or governmental or other sanctions are imposed, or if we do not prevail in any possible civil or criminal litigation, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be materially harmed. Responding to any action will likely result in a materially significant diversion of management’s attention and resources and significant defense and compliance costs and other professional fees. In addition, regulatory authorities may seek to hold us liable for successor liability for violations committed by companies in which we invest or that we acquire. As a general matter, enforcement actions and sanctions could harm our business, results of operations and financial condition.
Although we do not believe that we were a “passive foreign investment company,” or a PFIC, for U.S. federal income tax purposes for 2024, if we are a PFIC in 2025 or in any future year, a U.S. investor in our Ordinary shares or Warrants may be subject to adverse U.S. federal income tax consequences.
Under the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, or the Code, we will be classified as a PFIC for any taxable year in which, either (i) at least 75% of our gross income in a taxable year, including our pro rata share of the gross income of any corporation in which we are considered to own at least 25% of the shares by value, is passive income or (ii) at least 50% of our assets in a taxable year (ordinarily determined based on fair market value and averaged quarterly over the year), including our pro rata share of the assets of any corporation in which we are considered to own at least 25% of the shares by value, are held for the production of, or produce, passive income. Passive income generally includes, among other things, dividends, interest, rents and royalties (other than rents or royalties derived from the active conduct of a trade or business) and gains from the disposition of passive assets. The Company believes that it was not a PFIC for U.S. federal income tax purposes for its 2024 taxable year and it does not expect to become one in the foreseeable future. However, PFIC status is determined annually and depends on the composition of a company’s income and assets and the fair market value of its assets and no assurance can be given that we were not a PFIC in 2024, or as to whether we will be a PFIC in 2025 or for any future taxable years.
If we are a PFIC for any taxable year during which a U.S. investor holds our Ordinary shares or Warrants, we would continue to be treated as a PFIC with respect to that U.S. investor for all succeeding years during which the U.S. investor holds our Ordinary shares or Warrants, even if we ceased to meet the threshold requirements for PFIC status, unless certain exceptions apply. Such a U.S. investor may be subject to adverse U.S. federal income tax consequences, including (i) the treatment of all or a portion of any gain on the disposition of our Ordinary shares or Warrants as ordinary income (and therefore ineligible for the preferential rates that apply to capital gains with respect to some U.S. investors), (ii) the application of a deferred interest charge on such gain and the receipt of certain dividends on our Ordinary shares, (iii) the ineligibility to claim the preferential tax rate afforded to certain non-corporate U.S. investors on “qualified dividend income” with respect to dividends on our Ordinary shares and (iv) compliance with certain reporting requirements.
It may be difficult to enforce a U.S. judgment against Taboola or its respective directors and officers outside the United States, or to assert U.S. securities law claims outside of the United States.
A number of Taboola directors and executive officers are not residents of the United States, and the majority of Taboola’s assets and the assets of these persons are located outside the United States. As a result, it may be difficult or impossible for investors to effect service of process upon Taboola within the United States or other jurisdictions, including judgments predicated upon the civil liability provisions of the federal securities laws of the United States. Additionally, it may be difficult to assert U.S. securities law claims in actions originally instituted outside of the United States. Foreign courts may refuse to hear a U.S. securities law claim because foreign courts may not be the most appropriate forum in which to bring such a claim. Even if a foreign court agrees to hear a claim, it may determine that the law of the jurisdiction in which the foreign court resides, and not U.S. law, is applicable to the claim. Further, if U.S. law is found to be applicable, the content of applicable U.S. law must be proved as a fact, which can be a time-consuming and costly process, and certain matters of procedure would still be governed by the law of the jurisdiction in which the foreign court resides.
Risks Related to Our Intellectual Property and Technology
Our intellectual property and proprietary rights may be difficult to enforce, particularly because in many instances we rely on trade secrets rather than patents or similar registered legal protections. This could enable others to copy or use aspects of our platform without compensating us, which could erode our competitive advantages and harm our business.
Our success depends, in part, on our ability to protect proprietary methods and technologies that we develop under the intellectual property laws of Israel, the United States and other countries, so that we can prevent others from using our intellectual property and proprietary information. If we fail to protect our intellectual property and proprietary rights adequately, our competitors might gain access to our technology and proprietary information, and our business could be adversely affected. We rely on trademark, copyright, trade secret, patent and confidentiality procedures and contractual provisions to protect our proprietary methods and technologies.
Unauthorized parties may attempt to copy aspects of our technology or obtain and use information we regard as proprietary. We generally enter into confidentiality and/or license agreements with our employees, consultants, vendors and Advertisers, and generally limit access to and distribution of our proprietary information. However, any steps taken by us may not prevent infringement, misappropriation or other violation of our intellectual property, technology and proprietary information. Policing unauthorized use of our technology is difficult. In addition, the laws of some foreign countries may not be as protective of intellectual property and proprietary rights as those of the U.S, and mechanisms for enforcement of our intellectual property and proprietary rights in such countries may be inadequate. From time to time, legal action by us may be necessary to enforce our intellectual property and proprietary rights, to protect our trade secrets, to determine the validity and scope of the intellectual property and proprietary rights of others, or to defend against claims of infringement, misappropriation or other violation. Although we generally rely on trade secret laws to protect our intellectual property, we may encounter difficulties enforcing our rights where we lack patent protection. Such litigation could result in substantial costs and the diversion of limited resources and could negatively affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. If we are unable to protect our intellectual property and proprietary rights, including aspects of our technology platform, we may find ourselves at a competitive disadvantage to others who have not incurred the same level of expense, time and effort to create and protect their intellectual property.4
We may be subject to intellectual property rights claims by third parties, which are extremely costly to defend, could require us to pay significant damages and could limit our ability to use certain technologies.
Third parties may assert claims of infringement, misappropriation or other violation of intellectual property rights, including in proprietary technology, against us or against our digital properties or Advertisers for which we may be held liable or have an indemnification obligation. Our risk of third-party claims may be increased to the extent we rely on unaffiliated persons or firms, over whom we have less control than we would have over our own employees, to develop code. Any claim of infringement, misappropriation or other violation of intellectual property rights by a third party, even those without merit, could cause us to incur substantial costs defending against the claim and could distract our management from operating our business.
Although third parties may offer a license to their technology or other intellectual property, the terms of any offered license may not be acceptable and the failure to obtain a license or the costs associated with any license could cause our business, financial condition and results of operations to be materially and adversely affected. In addition, some licenses may be non-exclusive, and therefore our competitors may have access to the same technology licensed to us. Alternatively, we may be required to develop non-infringing technology, which could require significant effort and expense and ultimately may not be successful. Furthermore, a successful claimant could secure a judgment or we may agree to a settlement that prevents us from distributing certain products or performing certain services or that requires us to pay substantial damages, including treble damages if we are found to have willfully infringed such claimant’s patents or copyrights, royalties or other fees. Any of these events could seriously harm our business financial condition and results of operations.
Legal claims against us resulting from the actions of our Advertisers or digital properties could damage our reputation and be costly to defend.
We receive representations from Advertisers that the content we place on their behalf does not infringe on any third-party rights. We also rely on representations from our digital properties that their content does not infringe on any third-party rights and that they maintain adequate privacy policies that allow us to place pixels on their properties and collect data from users that visit those websites to aid in delivering our solutions. However, we do not independently verify whether we are permitted to deliver advertising to our digital properties’ Internet users or that the content we deliver is legally permitted. If any of our Advertisers’ or digital properties’ representations are untrue and our Advertisers or digital properties do not abide by foreign, federal, state or local laws or regulations governing their content or privacy practices, we could become subject to legal claims against us, we could be exposed to potential liability (for which we may or may not be indemnified by our Advertisers or digital properties), and our reputation could be damaged. Even in those instances where our Advertisers and digital properties do indemnify us, it is possible these entities may not be willing or able to cover the claims and we will be responsible for the cost of litigation or required to pay substantial damages.
Indemnity provisions in various agreements potentially expose us to substantial liability for intellectual property infringement and other losses.
Our agreements with digital properties, Advertiser and other third parties may include indemnification provisions under which we agree to indemnify them for losses suffered or incurred as a result of claims of intellectual property infringement, damages caused by us to property or persons, or other liabilities relating to or arising from our products, services, or other contractual obligations. The term of these indemnity provisions generally survives termination or expiration of the applicable agreement. Large indemnity payments would harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.
Our solution relies on third-party open-source software components, and failure to comply with the terms of the underlying open-source software licenses could restrict our ability to sell our platform.
Our platform, including our computational infrastructure, relies on software licensed to us by third-party authors under “open-source” licenses. The use of open-source software may entail greater risks than the use of third-party commercial software, as open-source licensors generally do not provide warranties, indemnities or other contractual protections regarding infringement claims or the quality of the code. Some open-source licenses contain requirements that we make available source code for modifications or derivative works of the open-source code on unfavorable terms or at no cost. If we combine our proprietary software with open-source software in a certain manner, we could, under certain open-source licenses, be required to release the source code of our proprietary software to the public. This would allow our competitors to create similar solutions with less development effort and time and ultimately put us at a competitive disadvantage.
Although we monitor our use of open-source software to avoid subjecting our products to conditions we do not intend, the terms of many open-source licenses have not been interpreted by United States courts, and there is a risk that these licenses could be construed in a way that could impose unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our ability to commercialize our services. Moreover, we cannot guarantee our processes for controlling our use of open-source software will be effective. If we face claims from third parties seeking to enforce the terms of an open-source software license, or if we are held to have breached the terms of an open-source software license, we could be required to seek licenses from third parties to continue operating our platform on terms that are not economically feasible, to re-engineer our platform or the supporting computational infrastructure to discontinue use of certain code, or to make generally available, in source code form, portions of our proprietary code, any of which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.
We face risks related to cybersecurity breaches, attacks or threats, or other outages or disruptions of our services, including scheduled or unscheduled downtime, which could harm our brand and reputation and negatively impact our revenue and results of operations.
As we grow our business, we expect to continue to invest in technology services, hardware and software, including data centers, network services, storage and database technologies. Creating the appropriate support for our technology platform, including large-scale serving infrastructure and big data transmission, storage and computation infrastructure, is expensive and complex, and our execution can result in inefficiencies or operational failures and increased vulnerability to cybersecurity breaches, attacks and threats which, in turn, could diminish the quality of our services and our performance for our digital properties and our Advertisers. Cyberbreaches, attacks and threats could include denial-of-service attacks impacting service availability (including the ability to deliver ads) and reliability; the exploitation of software vulnerabilities in Internet facing applications; phishing attacks or social engineering attacks (such as tricking company employees into releasing control of their systems to a hacker); or the introduction of computer viruses, software bugs, ransomware or malware into our systems, including with a view to steal, access, modify, destroy or disclose personal, confidential, sensitive or proprietary data. To date, we have not identified cybersecurity incidents that resulted in a material adverse impact to our business or operations, but there can be no guarantee we will not experience such an impact in the future. Cybersecurity breaches, attacks and threats of increasing sophistication may be difficult to detect and could result in the theft of our intellectual property and our data or our digital properties’ or Advertisers’ data, including our or our digital properties’ or Advertisers’ personal data. In addition, we are vulnerable to unintentional errors as well as malicious actions by persons with authorized access to our systems that exceed the scope of their access rights, or unintentionally or intentionally alter parameters or otherwise interfere with the intended operations of our platform.
A cybersecurity breach or attack, or a technology glitch, with respect to our systems, may cause a catastrophic effect where a large number of digital properties will stop using our service in a short period of time. While we take measures to protect the security of the systems and information used in the operation of our business, and to implement certain privacy protections with respect to such information, such measures may not always be effective. The steps we take to increase the reliability, integrity and security of our systems as they scale may be expensive and may not prevent system failures, unintended vulnerabilities or other cybersecurity incidents, including those resulting from the increasing number of persons with access to our systems, complex interactions within our technology platform and the increasing number of connections with third party partners and vendors’ technology. Furthermore, because the methods of cyber-attack and deception change frequently, are increasingly complex and sophisticated, and can originate from a wide variety of sources, including traditional computer hackers, organized crime groups, nation-state actors and nation-state supported actors. Despite our reasonable efforts to ensure the integrity of our systems, we may not be able to anticipate, detect, appropriately react and respond to, or implement effective preventative measures against, all cybersecurity incidents. Additionally, due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, there have been publicized threats to increase cyber-attack activity against the critical infrastructure of any nation or organization that retaliates against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Any such increase in such attacks on our third-party service providers or other systems could adversely affect our network systems or other operations. In addition to our own systems, we use third-party vendors to store, transmit and otherwise process certain of our personal, confidential, sensitive or proprietary data on our behalf. Due to applicable laws and regulations or contractual obligations, we may be held responsible for any cybersecurity incident attributed to our service providers as they relate to the information we share with them. Although we typically require contractual commitments from these service providers to implement and use reasonable security measures, we cannot control third parties and cannot guarantee a security breach will not occur in their systems.
We may be required to expend significant capital and other resources to protect against, respond to, and recover from any potential, attempted, or existing cybersecurity incidents. As cybersecurity incidents continue to evolve, we may be required to expend significant additional resources to continue to modify or enhance our protective measures or to investigate and remediate any information security vulnerabilities. In addition, our remediation efforts may not be successful. The inability to implement, maintain and upgrade adequate safeguards could have a material adverse effect on our results of operations, financial condition and cash flow. Operational errors or failures or successful cyber-attacks, media reports about such an incident, whether accurate or not, or our failure to make adequate or timely disclosures to the public or law enforcement agencies following any such event, whether due to delayed discovery or a failure to follow existing protocols, could result in violation of applicable privacy and data security laws and regulations, notification obligations, damage to our reputation, loss of current and new digital properties or Advertisers and other partners and clients, the disclosure of personal, confidential, sensitive or proprietary data, interruptions to our operations and distraction to our management, and significant legal, regulatory and financial liabilities and lost revenues, which could harm our business.
While we currently maintain cybersecurity insurance, such insurance may not be sufficient in type or amount to cover us against claims related to breaches, failures or other cybersecurity-related incidents, and we cannot be certain that cyber insurance will continue to be available to us on economically reasonable terms, or at all, or that any insurer will not deny coverage as to any future claim. The successful assertion of one or more large claims against us that exceed available insurance coverage, or the occurrence of changes in our insurance policies, including premium increases or the imposition of large deductible or co-insurance requirements, could have a material adverse effect on our results of operations, financial condition and cash flows.
Defects, errors or failures in our technology platform, including our software and systems, could adversely affect our business, operating results and growth prospects.
We depend upon the sustained and uninterrupted performance of our technology platform to operate fundamental aspects of our business. If our technology platform cannot scale to meet demand, or if there are defects or errors in our execution of any of these functions on our platform, then our business could be harmed. Our software and systems are complex and may contain defects or errors, or may experience failures when implemented or when new functionality is released, as we may modify, enhance, upgrade and implement new software, systems, procedures and controls to reflect changes in our business, technological advancements and changing industry trends. Undetected defects, errors and failures may occur, especially when new versions or updates are made. Despite testing by us, defects, errors or bugs in our software have in the past, and may in the future, not be found until the software is in our live operating environment. Any defects, errors, failures or other similar performance problems or disruptions in our software or systems could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. Defects, errors, failures or other similar performance problems or disruptions, whether in connection with day-to-day operations or otherwise, could damage our clients’ businesses and result in negative publicity, damage to our brand and reputation, loss of or delay in market acceptance of our solutions, increased costs or loss of revenue, loss of competitive position or claims by Advertisers for losses sustained by them. In such an event, we may be required or choose to expend additional resources to help mitigate any problems resulting from defects, errors or failures in our software or systems. Alleviating problems resulting from defects, errors or failures in our software or systems could require significant expenditures of capital and other resources and could cause interruptions, delays or the cessation of our business, any of which would adversely impact our financial position, results of operations and growth prospects. In addition, if we experience any defects, errors, failures or other performance problems, our partners could seek to terminate or elect not to renew their contracts, delay or withhold payment or make claims against us. Any of these actions could result in liability, lost business, increased insurance costs, difficulty in collecting accounts receivable, costly litigation or adverse publicity, which could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. Additionally, our software utilizes open-source software and any defects or errors in such open-source software could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.
We rely on third-party service providers for many aspects of our business, and any disruption of service experienced by such third-party service providers or our failure to manage and maintain existing relationships or identify other high-quality, third-party service providers could harm our business, results of operations and growth prospects.
We rely on a variety of third-party service providers in connection with the operation of our solutions. Any performance issues, errors, bugs, defects or failures with respect to third-party software or services could result in performance issues, errors, bugs, defects or failures with respect to our solutions, which could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. Many of our third-party service providers attempt to impose limitations on their liability for such performance issues, errors, bugs, defects or failures, and if enforceable, we may have additional liability to our clients or to other third parties that could harm our reputation and increase our operating costs. Additionally, in the future, we might need to license other software or services to enhance our solutions and meet evolving client demands and requirements, which may not be available to us on commercially reasonable terms or at all. Any limitations in our ability to use or obtain third-party software or services could significantly increase our expenses and otherwise result in delays, a reduction in functionality, or performance issues, errors, bugs, defects or failures with respect to our solutions until equivalent technology or content is either developed by us or, if available, identified, obtained through purchase or licensed and integrated into our solutions, which could adversely affect our business. In addition, third-party software and services may expose us to increased risks, including risks associated with the integration of new technology, the diversion of resources from the development of our own proprietary technology and our inability to generate revenue from new technology sufficient to offset associated acquisition and maintenance costs, all of which may increase our expenses and materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. We will need to maintain our relationships with third-party service providers and obtain software and services from such providers that do not contain any errors, bugs or defects. Any failure to do so could adversely affect our ability to deliver effective solutions to our clients and adversely affect our business.
Risks Related to Being a Public Company
Our management team has limited experience managing a public company.
Most members of our management team have limited experience managing a publicly traded company, interacting with public company investors, and complying with the increasingly complex laws, rules and regulations that govern public companies. As a public company, we are subject to significant obligations relating to reporting, procedures and internal controls, and our management team may not successfully or efficiently manage such obligations. These obligations and scrutiny require significant attention from our management and could divert their attention away from the day-to-day management of our business, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.
We are required to provide management’s assessment on the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting. If we are unable to maintain appropriate internal financial reporting controls and procedures, it could cause us to fail to meet our reporting obligations on a timely basis, result in material misstatements in our consolidated financial statements and adversely affect our operating results.
As a public company, we have significant requirements for enhanced financial reporting and internal controls. The process of designing, implementing, testing and maintaining effective internal controls is a continuous effort that requires us to anticipate and react to changes in our business and the economic and regulatory environments. In this regard, we will need to continue to dedicate internal resources, potentially engage outside consultants, adopt a detailed work plan to assess and document the adequacy of internal control over financial reporting, continue steps to improve control processes as appropriate, validate through testing whether such controls are functioning as documented, and maintain a continuous reporting and improvement process for internal control over financial reporting.
Pursuant to Section 404(a) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, we are required to file a report with the SEC by our management on, among other things, the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting. This assessment is required to include disclosure of any material weaknesses identified by our management in our internal control over financial reporting. The rules governing the standards that must be met for our management to assess our internal control over financial reporting are complex and require significant documentation and testing. Testing and maintaining internal controls may divert our management’s attention from other matters that are important to our business. In addition, pursuant to Section 404(b), we are required to include in the annual reports that we file with the SEC an attestation report on our internal control over financial reporting issued by our independent registered public accounting firm. It is possible in the future that our internal control over financial reporting will not be effective because it cannot detect or prevent material errors at a reasonable level of assurance. If we are unable to maintain appropriate internal financial reporting controls and procedures, it could cause us to fail to meet our reporting obligations on a timely basis, result in material misstatements in our consolidated financial statements and adversely affect our operating results.
Furthermore, we may, during the course of our annual testing of our internal controls or during the related testing by our independent registered public accounting firm, identify deficiencies which would have to be remediated to satisfy the SEC rules for certification of our internal controls over financial reporting. As a consequence, we may have to disclose in periodic reports we file with the SEC significant deficiencies or material weaknesses in our system of internal controls. The existence of a material weakness would preclude management from concluding that our internal controls over financial reporting are effective, and would preclude our independent auditors from issuing an unqualified opinion that our internal controls over financial reporting are effective. In addition, disclosures of this type in our SEC reports could cause investors to lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reporting and may negatively affect the trading price of our Ordinary shares, and we could be subject to sanctions or investigations by regulatory authorities. Moreover, effective internal controls are necessary to produce reliable financial reports and to prevent fraud. If we have deficiencies in our disclosure controls and procedures or internal controls over financial reporting, it could negatively impact our business, results of operations and reputation.
We incur increased costs as a result of operating as a public company, and our management is required to devote substantial time to compliance initiatives and corporate governance practices.
As a public company, we incur significant legal, accounting and other expenses that we did not incur as a private company. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the listing requirements of Nasdaq and other applicable securities rules and regulations impose various requirements on public companies, including establishment and maintenance of effective disclosure and financial controls and corporate governance practices. Our management and other personnel continue to devote a substantial amount of time to these compliance initiatives. Moreover, these rules and regulations will continue to increase our legal and financial compliance costs and will make some activities more time-consuming and costly. The risks associated with non-compliance may make it more difficult for us to attract and retain qualified directors and may increase costs of director and officer liability insurance.
We continue to evaluate these rules and regulations and cannot predict or estimate the amount of additional costs we may incur or the timing of such costs. These rules and regulations are often subject to varying interpretations, in many cases due to their lack of specificity, and, as a result, their application in practice may evolve over time as new guidance is provided by regulatory and governing bodies. This could result in continuing uncertainty regarding compliance matters and higher costs necessitated by ongoing revisions to disclosure and governance practices.
We are required to comply with the SEC’s rules implementing Sections 302 and 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires management to certify financial and other information in our annual reports and provide an annual management report on the effectiveness of control over financial reporting. In 2022, we were required to make our first annual assessment of our internal control over financial reporting pursuant to Section 404(a). In addition, pursuant to Section 404(b), we are required to include in the annual reports that we file with the SEC an attestation report on our internal control over financial reporting issued by our independent registered public accounting firm. To achieve compliance with Section 404, we engaged in a process to document and evaluate our internal control over financial reporting, which is both costly and challenging. To maintain compliance, we will need to continue to dedicate internal resources, potentially engage outside consultants and adopt a detailed work plan to assess and document the adequacy of internal control over financial reporting, continue steps to improve control processes as appropriate, validate through testing that controls are functioning as documented and implement a continuous reporting and improvement process for internal control over financial reporting.
If we identify one or more material weaknesses, it could result in an adverse reaction in the financial markets due to a loss of confidence in the reliability of our financial statements. As a result, the market price of our Ordinary shares could be negatively affected, and we could become subject to litigation including shareholder suits or investigations by the stock exchange on which our securities are listed, the SEC or other regulatory authorities, which could require additional financial and management resources.
Risks Related to Our Ordinary shares
Our share price may be volatile, and you may lose all or part of your investment.
The market price of our Ordinary shares could be highly volatile and may fluctuate substantially as a result of many factors, including:
•actual or anticipated fluctuations in our results of operations;
•variance in our financial performance from the expectations of market analysts or others;
•announcements by us or our competitors of significant business developments, changes in significant customers, acquisitions or expansion plans;
•our involvement in litigation;
•our sale of Ordinary shares or other securities in the future;
•market conditions in our industry;
•changes in key personnel;
•the trading volume of our Ordinary shares;
•changes in the estimation of the future size and growth rate of our markets; and
•general economic and market conditions.
In addition, the stock markets have experienced extreme price and volume fluctuations. Broad market and industry factors may materially harm the market price of our Ordinary shares, regardless of our operating performance. In the past, following periods of volatility in the market price of a company’s securities, securities class action litigation has often been instituted against that company. If we were involved in any similar litigation we could incur substantial costs and our management’s attention and resources could be diverted.
An active trading market for our Ordinary shares may not be sustained to provide adequate liquidity.
An active trading market may not be sustained for our Ordinary shares. The lack of an active market may impair your ability to sell your shares at the time you wish to sell them or at a price that you consider reasonable. An inactive market may also impair our ability to raise capital by selling Ordinary shares and may impair our ability to acquire other companies by using our shares as consideration.
The market price of our Ordinary shares could be negatively affected by future issuances or sales of our Ordinary shares.
As of December 31, 2024, we have 293,134,865 Ordinary shares outstanding. Sales by us or our shareholders of a substantial number of Ordinary shares, the issuance of Ordinary shares as consideration for acquisitions, or the perception that these sales might occur, could cause the market price of our Ordinary shares to decline or could impair our ability to raise capital through a future sale of, or pay for acquisitions using, our equity securities.
If any of our large shareholders or members of our management were to sell substantial amounts of our Ordinary shares and/or Warrants in the public markets, or the market perceives that such sales may occur, this could have the effect of increasing the volatility in, and put significant downward pressure on, the trading price of our Ordinary shares and/or Warrants. Any such volatility or decrease in the trading price of our Ordinary shares and/or Warrants could also adversely affect our ability to raise capital through an issue of equity securities in the future.
We do not expect to pay any dividends in the foreseeable future.
We have never declared or paid any dividends on our Ordinary shares. We do not anticipate paying any dividends in the foreseeable future. We currently intend to retain future earnings, if any, to finance operations and expand our business.
Our board of directors has sole discretion over whether to pay dividends. If our board of directors decides to pay dividends, the form, frequency and amount will depend upon our future operations and earnings, capital requirements and surplus, general financial condition, contractual restrictions and other factors that our directors may deem relevant. In addition, the Israeli Companies Law, 5759-1999, or Companies Law, imposes restrictions on our ability to declare and pay dividends. Payment of dividends may also be subject to Israeli withholding taxes.
If securities or industry analysts cease to publish research or reports about our business, or if they issue an adverse or misleading opinion regarding our stock, our stock price and trading volume could decline.
The trading market for our Ordinary shares is influenced by the research and reports that industry or securities analysts publish about us or our business. If any of the analysts who cover us issue an adverse or misleading opinion regarding us, our business model, our intellectual property or our share performance, or if our results of operations fail to meet the expectations of analysts, our share price would likely decline. If one or more of these analysts cease coverage of our Company or fail to publish reports on us regularly, our visibility in the financial markets could decrease, which in turn could cause our Ordinary Share price or trading volume to decline.
We may issue additional Ordinary shares or other equity securities without your approval, which would dilute your ownership interests and may depress the market price of our Ordinary shares.
We may issue additional Ordinary shares or other equity securities in the future in connection with, among other things, future capital raising and transactions and future acquisitions, without your approval in many circumstances. Such issuance of additional Ordinary shares or other equity securities would have the following effects:
•Our existing shareholders’ proportionate ownership interest in Taboola may decrease;
•the amount of cash available per share, including for payment of dividends in the future, may decrease;
•the relative voting strength of each previously outstanding ordinary share may be diminished; and
•the trading price of our Ordinary shares may decline.
Risks Related to the Warrants
We may redeem your unexpired Warrants prior to their exercise at a time that is disadvantageous to you, thereby making your Warrants worth less.
Under the terms of the public Warrants, we may exercise the redemption right even if we are unable to register or qualify the underlying securities for sale under all applicable state securities laws. Redemption of the outstanding Warrants could force holders (i) to exercise the Warrants and pay the exercise price therefor at a time when it may be disadvantageous to do so, (ii) to sell the Warrants at the then-current market price when the holder might otherwise wish to hold its Warrants or (iii) to accept the nominal redemption price which, at the time the outstanding Warrants are called for redemption, is likely to be substantially less than the market value of the Warrants. The Warrants exchanged for ION warrants that were issued in a private placement, as part of the Business Combination, are not expected to be redeemable by Taboola so long as they are held by the Sponsors or their permitted transferees.
There can be no assurance that our Warrants received by holders of ION warrants in the Business Combination will be in the money at the time they become exercisable or otherwise, and they may expire worthless.
The exercise price of our Warrants issued in exchange for the outstanding ION warrants is $11.50 per ordinary share. There can be no assurance that our Warrants will be in the money following the time they become exercisable and prior to their expiration, and as such, the Warrants may expire worthless.
Risks Relating to Our Incorporation and Location in Israel
Conditions in Israel, including the war in Israel, could have a material adverse effect on our business and operations.
We are incorporated under the laws of the State of Israel, and our principal research and development facilities, including our major data centers, are located in Israel. Accordingly, political, economic and military conditions in Israel directly affect our business. Since the State of Israel was established in 1948, a number of armed conflicts have occurred between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
As has been widely publicly reported, starting October 2023 war was declared in Israel. Although we are a company formed under the laws of the State of Israel and have a significant presence there, we are a global company with operations in multiple countries. We maintain a business continuity plan and have taken the steps designed to maintain our operations in light of the war in Israel. As of the date of this Annual Report, our operations have not been materially adversely affected by the war.
We cannot predict the duration or severity of the war in Israel or how it will evolve, including any possible escalation or expansion of the war or other hostilities with other countries or groups, any of which could exacerbate geopolitical tensions and have economic implications. In connection with the war in Israel, several hundred thousand Israeli military reservists were called to immediate service. Certain of our employees and consultants in Israel have been called, and additional ones may be called, for service. Although some military reservists have since been released, they may be called up for additional reserve duty, depending on developments in the war and those persons may be absent for an extended period of time. In addition, due to the war or other hostilities our facilities could be damaged and our operations could be otherwise disrupted, which can impact our ability to deliver products and services in a timely manner to meet our contractual obligations towards customers. Any of the foregoing and related risks and uncertainties could have a material adverse effect on our business and operations.
Further, the State of Israel and Israeli companies have been from time to time subjected to economic boycotts. Several countries, principally in the Middle East, still restrict doing business with Israel and Israeli companies, and additional countries may impose restrictions on doing business with Israel and Israeli companies if hostilities in Israel or political instability in the region continues or increases. Any hostilities involving Israel or the interruption or curtailment of trade between Israel and its present trading partners, or significant downturn in the economic or financial condition of Israel, could adversely affect our operations and product development, and could cause our sales to decrease.
Prior to the outbreak of war in October 2023, the Israeli government pursued extensive changes to Israel’s judicial system. In response to the foregoing developments, many individuals, organizations and institutions, within and outside of Israel, have voiced concerns over the potential negative impacts of such changes and the controversy surrounding them on the business and financial environment in Israel. Such negative impacts may include, among others, a downgrade in Israel’s sovereign credit rating, increased interest rates, currency fluctuations, inflation, civil unrest and volatility in securities markets, which could adversely affect the conditions in which we operate in Israel and potentially deter foreign investors and organizations from investing or transacting business in Israel. If any of the foregoing risks were to materialize, it may have an adverse effect on our business, our results of operations and our ability to raise additional funds.
Investors’ rights and responsibilities as our shareholders will be governed by Israeli law, which may differ in some respects from the rights and responsibilities of shareholders of non-Israeli companies.
We were incorporated under Israeli law and the rights and responsibilities of our shareholders are governed by our articles of association and Israeli law. These rights and responsibilities differ in some respects from the rights and responsibilities of shareholders of U.S. and other non-Israeli corporations. In particular, a shareholder of an Israeli company has a duty to act in good faith and in a customary manner in exercising its rights and performing its obligations towards the company and other shareholders and to refrain from abusing its power in the company, including, among other things, in voting at the general meeting of shareholders on certain matters, such as an amendment to the company’s articles of association, an increase of the company’s authorized share capital, a merger of the company and approval of related party transactions that require shareholder approval. A shareholder also has a general duty to refrain from discriminating against other shareholders. In addition, a controlling shareholder or a shareholder who knows that it possesses the power to determine the outcome of a shareholders’ vote or to appoint or prevent the appointment of an office holder in the company has a duty to act in fairness towards the company. These provisions may be interpreted to impose additional obligations and liabilities on our shareholders that are not typically imposed on shareholders of U.S. corporations.
Provisions of Israeli law and our amended and restated articles of association may delay, prevent or make undesirable an acquisition of all or a significant portion of our shares or assets.
Provisions of Israeli law and our amended and restated articles of association could have the effect of delaying or preventing a change in control and may make it more difficult for a third-party to acquire us or our shareholders to elect different individuals to our board of directors, even if doing so would be considered to be beneficial by some of our shareholders, and may limit the price that investors may be willing to pay in the future for our Ordinary shares. Among other things:
•Israeli corporate law regulates mergers and requires that a tender offer be effected when more than a specified percentage of shares in a company are purchased;
•Israeli corporate law requires special approvals for certain transactions involving directors, officers or significant shareholders and regulates other matters that may be relevant to these types of transactions;
•Israeli corporate law does not provide for shareholder action by written consent for public companies, thereby requiring all shareholder actions to be taken at a general meeting of shareholders;
•our amended and restated articles of association divide our directors into three classes, each of which is elected once every three years;
•our amended and restated articles of association generally requires that 33⅓% of our outstanding shares entitled to vote to be present in person or by proxy to constitute a quorum;
•our amended and restated articles of association generally require a vote of the holders of a majority of our outstanding Ordinary shares entitled to vote present and voting on the matter at a general meeting of shareholders (referred to as simple majority), and the amendment of a limited number of provisions, such as the provision empowering our board of directors to determine the size of the board, the provision dividing our directors into three classes, the provision that sets forth the procedures and the requirements that must be met in order for a shareholder to require the Company to include a matter on the agenda for a general meeting of the shareholders and the provisions relating to the election and removal of members of our board of directors and empowering our board of directors to fill vacancies on the board, require a vote of the holders of 65% of our outstanding Ordinary shares entitled to vote at a general meeting;
•our amended and restated articles of association do not permit a director to be removed except by a vote of the holders of at least 65% of our outstanding shares entitled to vote at a general meeting of shareholders; and
•our amended and restated articles of association provide that director vacancies may be filled by our board of directors.
Further, Israeli tax considerations may make potential transactions undesirable to us or some of our shareholders whose country of residence does not have a tax treaty with Israel granting tax relief to such shareholders from Israeli tax. For example, Israeli tax law does not recognize tax-free share exchanges to the same extent as U.S. tax law. With respect to mergers, Israeli tax law allows for tax deferral in certain circumstances but makes the deferral contingent on the fulfillment of numerous conditions, including, a holding period of two years from the date of the transaction during which certain sales and dispositions of shares of the participating companies are restricted. Moreover, with respect to certain share swap transactions, the tax deferral is limited in time, and when such time expires, the tax becomes payable even if no disposition of the shares has occurred.
Our amended and restated articles of association provide that unless we consent otherwise, the competent courts of Tel Aviv, Israel shall be the sole and exclusive forum for substantially all disputes between Taboola and its shareholders under the Companies Law and the Israeli Securities Law, which could limit its shareholders ability to brings claims and proceedings against, as well as obtain favorable judicial forum for disputes with Taboola, its directors, officers and other employees.
Unless we agree otherwise, the competent courts of Tel Aviv, Israel shall be the exclusive forum for (i) any derivative action or proceeding brought on behalf of Taboola, (ii) any action asserting a claim of breach of fiduciary duty owed by any our director, officer or other employee to Taboola or our shareholders, or (iii) any action asserting a claim arising pursuant to any provision of the Companies Law or the Israeli Securities Law, 1968, or Israeli Securities Law. Such exclusive forum provision in our amended and restated articles of association will not relieve Taboola of its duties to comply with federal securities laws and the rules and regulations thereunder, and our shareholders will not be deemed to have waived Taboola’s compliance with these laws, rules and regulations. This exclusive forum provision may limit a shareholders’ ability to bring a claim in a judicial forum of its choosing for disputes with Taboola or its directors or other employees which may discourage lawsuits against Taboola, its directors, officers and employees. The foregoing exclusive forum provision is intended to apply to claims arising under Israeli Law and would not apply to claims for which the federal courts of the United States would have exclusive jurisdiction, whether by law or pursuant to our amended and restated articles of association, including claims under the Securities Act for which there is a separate exclusive forum provision in our amended and restated articles of association.
General Risks
Fluctuations in the exchange rates of foreign currencies could result in currency transaction losses that negatively impact our financial results.
We currently have sales denominated in currencies other than the US dollar. In addition, we incur a portion of our operating expenses in Brazilian Reals, British pounds, Euro, Israeli shekels, Japanese Yen and Thai baht, among others. Any fluctuation in the exchange rates of these foreign currencies could negatively impact our business, financial condition and results of operations. We have a foreign currency cash flow hedging program to address possible exposure arising from expected expenses to be paid in NIS. As part of this program we hedge a portion of our anticipated NIS denominated payroll of Israeli employees for a period of one to twelve months with forward contracts and other derivative instruments. We may continue to pursue additional currency hedging or may modify or terminate these arrangements from time to time. We intend to enter into these transactions only to hedge underlying risk reasonably related to our business and not for speculative purposes. There can be no assurance that any such activities will be effective or beneficial to us in whole or in part for several reasons including lack of experience, costs or illiquid markets. In addition, it is difficult to predict the effect hedging activities would have on our results of operations, and hedging activities can themselves result in losses.
In periods of economic uncertainty, businesses may delay or reduce their spending on advertising, we are exposed to the credit risk of some of our clients and customers as well as increased cost of operation in Israel, any of which could materially harm our business.
Inflation, which persisted throughout 2024, has adversely affected us by increasing the costs of equipment and labor needed to operate our business and could continue to adversely affect us in future periods. Unstable inflation conditions make it difficult for us and our clients to accurately forecast and plan future business activities, and could cause our clients to reduce or delay their advertising spending with us. Historically, economic downturns, including conditions such as inflation, recessions, or other changes in economic conditions have resulted in overall reductions in advertising spending, and businesses may curtail spending both on advertising in general and on solutions such as ours. We cannot predict the timing, strength or duration of any economic slowdown or recovery. Any macroeconomic deterioration in the future could impair our revenue and results of operations.
Our exposure to credit risks relating to our financing activities may increase if our customers are adversely affected by periods of economic uncertainty, including inflation, recession, pandemic, or other changes in economic conditions, or a global economic downturn. These may significantly impact our operating results and financial condition
Historically, credit losses with respect to accounts receivable have generally not been significant. However, we do not require collateral from Advertisers and our normal practice is to allow a period of time before an Advertiser is required to pay us for our services. In addition, although we may seek to reduce the credit exposures of our accounts receivable by credit limits and credit insurance for certain customers, there can be no assurance that any of our efforts to mitigate credit risks will be successful.
Economic downturns and political and market conditions beyond our control could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.
Our business depends on the overall demand for advertising and on the economic health of our current and prospective Advertisers. Economic downturns or instability in political or market conditions may cause current or new Advertisers to reduce their advertising budgets. Adverse economic conditions and general uncertainty about economic recovery are likely to affect our business prospects. This could expose us to increased credit risk on Advertiser insertion orders, which, in turn, could negatively impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.
In addition, continued geopolitical turmoil in many parts of the world have, and may continue to, put pressure on global economic conditions, which could lead to reduced spending on advertising. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has significantly amplified existing geopolitical tensions among Russia, Ukraine, Europe, the West and China. We cannot predict how the war in Ukraine will evolve, but any escalation or expansion of the conflict into other countries, particularly in Europe, would exacerbate geopolitical tensions and could lead to political and/or economic response from the U.S., the E.U. and other countries, which may adversely impact economic conditions. In particular, Russia’s military incursion and the resulting sanctions have and could continue to adversely affect global energy and financial markets and thus could adversely impact our operations and the price of our Ordinary shares. The extent and duration of the military action, the response thereto, including resulting sanctions, and resulting future market disruptions, are impossible to predict, but could be significant. Additionally, any such disruptions, resulting sanctions or other actions (including cyberattacks) may magnify the impact of other risk factors discussed in this Annual Report.
We may require additional capital to support growth, and such capital might not be available on terms acceptable to us, if at all. This could hamper our growth and adversely affect our business.
We intend to continue to make investments to support our business growth and may require additional funds to respond to business challenges, including the need to develop new features or enhance our platform, improve our operating infrastructure or acquire complementary businesses and technologies. Accordingly, we may need to engage in public or private equity, equity-linked or debt financings to secure additional funds. If we raise additional funds through future issuances of equity or convertible debt securities, our existing shareholders could suffer significant dilution, and any new equity securities we issue could have rights, preferences and privileges superior to those of our existing shareholders. Any debt financing that we secure in the future could involve restrictive covenants relating to our capital raising activities and other financial and operational matters, including the ability to pay dividends. This may make it more difficult for us to obtain additional capital and to pursue business opportunities, including potential acquisitions. We may not be able to obtain additional financing on terms favorable to us, if at all. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing on terms satisfactory to us when we require it, our ability to continue to support our business growth and respond to business challenges could be significantly impaired, and our business could be adversely affected.
We are exposed to the risk of natural disasters, political events, war, terrorism and the emergence of another pandemic, each of which could disrupt our business and adversely affect our results of operations.
Events beyond our control could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and cash flows. Disruption to our platform resulting from natural disasters, political events, war, terrorism, pandemics or other reasons could impair our ability to continue to provide uninterrupted platform service to our Advertisers and digital properties. For example, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the responses taken and which may be taken by the U.S., NATO, other countries, multinational companies and others have created global security concerns that could have a lasting adverse impact on regional and global economies, and in turn, may lead to reduced spending on advertising and adversely affect our results of operations. Similarly, disruptions in the operations of our key third-parties, such as data centers, servers or other technology providers, could have a material adverse effect on our business.
While we have disaster recovery arrangements in place, they have not been tested under actual disasters or similar events and may not effectively permit us to continue to provide our platform. If any of these events were to occur to our business, our business, results of operations, or financial condition could be adversely affected.
Expansion of current and new partners and clients in our existing international markets is important to our long-term success, and our limited experience in operating our business in certain locations increases the risk that our international operations will not be successful.
As of December 31, 2024 we have offices in Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Turkey, Thailand, India, Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Poland, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Hong Kong, Italy, and Hungary. Expansion into new international markets requires additional management attention and resources in order to tailor our solutions to the unique aspects of each country. In addition, we face the following additional risks associated with our expansion into international locations:
•challenges caused by distance, language and cultural differences;
•longer payment cycles in some countries;
•credit risk and higher levels of payment fraud;
•compliance with applicable foreign laws and regulations, including laws and regulations with respect to privacy, data protection, consumer protection, spam and content, and the risk of penalties to our users and individual members of management if our practices are deemed to be out of compliance;
•unique or different market dynamics or business practices;
•currency exchange rate fluctuations or inflation;
•foreign exchange controls;
•political and economic instability and export restrictions;
•potentially adverse tax consequences; and
•higher costs associated with doing business internationally.
These risks could harm our international expansion efforts, which could have a materially adverse effect on our business, financial condition or results of operations.

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ITEM 1B. UNRESOLVED STAFF COMMENTS
ITEM 1B:UNRESOLVED STAFF COMMENTS
None.

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ITEM 2. PROPERTIES
ITEM 2: PROPERTIES
Our corporate headquarters is in New York City and our core research and development team is in Tel Aviv. We maintain offices in major cities around the world to serve our geographically diverse client base. Additionally, we operate data centers in the United States, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore and Netherlands and have ten data centers which are operated under collocation agreements with six third-party data center providers. Certain of our real property and other leases are further described in Notes 9, 12, 18 and 20 of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements elsewhere in this Annual Report.
We lease all of our facilities. We do not own any real property. We believe our current facilities are adequate to meet our immediate needs.

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ITEM 3. LEGAL PROCEEDINGS
ITEM 3: LEGAL PROCEEDINGS
From time to time we are a party to various litigation matters incidental to the conduct of our business. We are not presently party to any legal proceedings the resolution of which we believe would have a material adverse effect on our consolidated business prospects, financial condition, liquidity, results of operation, cash flows or capital levels.

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ITEM 4. MINE SAFETY DISCLOSURE
ITEM 4: MINE SAFETY DISCLOSURES
Not applicable.
PART II

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ITEM 5. MARKET FOR REGISTRANT'S COMMON EQUITY
ITEM 5: MARKET FOR REGISTRANT’S COMMON EQUITY, RELATED STOCKHOLDER MATTERS AND ISSUER PURCHASES OF EQUITY SECURITIES
Market for Registrants Ordinary shares and Warrants
Our Ordinary shares and Warrants began trading on the Nasdaq Global Market under the symbols “TBLA” and “TBLAW,” respectively, on June 30, 2021. Prior to this, no public market existed for our Ordinary shares.
Based on a review of the information provided to us by our transfer agent, as of February 19, 2025, there were 292 registered holders of our Ordinary shares. The number of registered holders does not represent the actual number of beneficial owners of our Ordinary shares because the shares of Ordinary shares are frequently held in “street name” by securities dealers and others for the benefit of individual owners who have the right to vote and/or dispositive power with respect to their shares.
Dividend Policy
We have never declared or paid any dividends on our Ordinary shares. We do not anticipate paying any dividends in the foreseeable future. We currently intend to retain future earnings, if any, to finance operations and expand our business. Our board of directors has sole discretion whether to pay dividends. If our board of directors decides to pay dividends, the form, frequency and amount will depend upon our future operations and earnings, capital requirements and surplus, general financial condition, contractual restrictions and other factors that our directors may deem relevant. The Companies Law imposes restrictions on our ability to declare and pay dividends and payment of dividends may be subject to Israeli withholding taxes.
Purchases of Equity Securities by the Issuer and Affiliated Purchasers
The following table provides information about Ordinary shares repurchased pursuant to our Buyback Program for the three months ended December 31, 2024.
Period (a) Total Number of Shares Purchased (b) Average Price Paid Per Share (1) (c) Total Number of Shares Purchased as Part of Publicly Announced Program (d) Approximate Dollar Value of Shares that May Yet Be Purchased Under the Plan or Program (2)
October 1 - October 31, 2024
1,007,000 $ 3.45 1,007,000 $ 52,104,923
November 1 - November 30, 2024
948,455 $ 3.40 948,455 $ 48,880,883
December 1 - December 31, 2024
847,555 $ 3.92 847,555 $ 45,561,509
(1)Excludes broker and transaction fees.
(2)On May 10, 2023, the Company announced a share buyback program for the repurchase of up to $40.0 million of our outstanding Shares, with no expiration date (the “Buyback Program”). On November 7, 2023, the Board authorized up to an additional $40.0 million of buybacks under the Buyback Program and in February 2024, the Board authorized up to $100.0 million for use under the Buyback Program, including any remaining authority from the November 2023 Board authorization. On February 26, 2025, the Company announced that the Board authorized up to an additional $200.0 million for use under the Buyback Program. The Buyback Program permits us to purchase our Shares from time to time in the open market, including through trading plans intended to comply with Rule 10b5-1 under the Exchange Act, in privately negotiated transactions or otherwise. The timing and amount of any share buybacks will be subject to market conditions and other factors determined by the Company. The Company may suspend, modify or discontinue the Buyback Program at any time in its sole discretion without prior notice.
Shareholder Return Performance Presentation
This performance graph shall not be deemed “soliciting material” or to be “filed” with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC, for purposes of Section 18 of the Exchange Act, or otherwise subject to the liabilities under that Section, and shall not be deemed to be incorporated by reference into any of our filings under the Securities Act.
The graph below compares the cumulative total shareholder return on our Ordinary shares from June 30, 2021 (the date our Ordinary shares commenced trading on the NASDAQ) through December 31, 2024 with the cumulative total return on the NASDAQ Composite Index and S&P SmallCap 600 Communication Services Index. All values assume a $100 initial investment and data for the NASDAQ Composite Index and S&P SmallCap 600 Communication Services Index assume reinvestment of dividends. The comparisons are based on historical data and are not indicative of, nor intended to forecast, the future performance of our Ordinary shares.

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ITEM 6. SELECTED FINANCIAL DATA
ITEM 6: [RESERVED]

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ITEM 7. MANAGEMENT'S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS
ITEM 7: MANAGEMENT’S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS OF FINANCIAL CONDITION AND RESULTS OF OPERATION
You should read the following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations together with Taboola’s audited consolidated financial statements and the related notes appearing elsewhere in this Annual Report. Some of the information contained in this discussion and analysis is set forth elsewhere in this Annual Report, including information with respect to Taboola’s plans and strategy for Taboola’s business, and includes forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. As a result of many factors, including those factors set forth in the section titled “Risk Factors” and “Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements,” Taboola’s actual results could differ materially from the results described in or implied by the forward-looking statements contained in the following discussion and analysis. Throughout this section, unless otherwise noted or the context requires otherwise, “we,” “us,” “our” and the “Company” refer to Taboola and its consolidated subsidiaries, and in references to monetary amounts, “dollars” and “$” refer to U.S. Dollars, and “NIS” refers to New Israeli Shekels
Overview
Taboola is a technology company that helps businesses grow by placing ads on publisher sites, mobile apps, and devices, which we collectively refer to as digital properties. We operate outside of the major search and social media walled gardens such as Meta, Google, and Amazon. Thousands of Advertisers trust us to drive growth, while approximately 11,000 digital property partners, including NBCNews, Disney, Yahoo, and Apple, rely on us for monetization and audience growth. Our scale is meaningful - we reach approximately 600 million people a day, gaining real-time insight into what people read and buy. This gives us unique “pulse of the internet” data - which alongside our artificial intelligence (AI) - is our competitive advantage and helps our advertiser clients achieve exceptional returns on their advertising spend.
Taboola began operations in 2007 and our technology provides significant value to both digital property partners and Advertisers. 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. We also provide a meaningful monetization opportunity to digital properties by matching relevant advertising to their audience in real time. 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 performance advertising platform to reach targeted audiences utilizing effective 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 performance AI engine. 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 performance AI engine was built to address a technology challenge of significant complexity: predicting which content, both advertisements and editorial, 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. We are the only independent performance platform that goes beyond search and social, and delivers outcomes at scale for advertisers, leveraging our unique supply, 1st-party data and AI technology.
For more information about ex-TAC Gross Profit, Adjusted EBITDA and Non-GAAP Net Income, see “Operating and Financial Review and Prospects -Non-GAAP Financial Measures.”
For more information about ex-TAC Gross Profit, Adjusted EBITDA and Non-GAAP Net Income, see “Management’s Business Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations- Non-GAAP Financial Measures.”
Subsequent Developments
On February 26, 2025, Taboola announced a new focus beyond native advertising, a powerful new technology platform called Realize and opened Realize for all advertisers.
Taboola has been a market leader in native advertising for more than a decade, driving success for advertisers, primarily in “bottom-of-article” placements. Taboola is now extending beyond this legacy with the introduction of Realize, a platform that specializes in performance outcomes at scale beyond search and social.
Realize leverages our unique data, performance AI and an increasingly diverse range of inventory and creative formats to achieve performance objectives
Key Factors and Trends Affecting our Performance
We believe that our performance and future success depend on several factors that present significant opportunities for us but also pose risks and challenges, including those discussed below and those referred to in Part I, Item 1A,“Risk Factors.”
Maintaining and Growing Our Digital Property Partners
We engage with a diverse network of digital property partners, substantially all of which have contracts with us containing either an evergreen term or an exclusive partnership with us for multi-year terms at inception for their native advertising supply. These agreements typically require that our code be integrated on the digital property web page because of the nature of providing both editorial and paid recommendations. In the portion of our business that is tied to these native advertising supply partnerships. which currently accounts for the vast majority of our business, we do not bid for ad placements, as traditionally happens in the advertising technology space, but rather see all users that visit the pages on which we appear. Due to our multi-year exclusive contracts and high retention rates, our supply is relatively consistent and predictable. We had approximately 11,000, 12,000 and 15,000 digital property partners in the fourth quarter of 2024, 2023 and 2022, respectively.
As a result of the launch of our Realize performance platform on February 26, 2025, we expect a growing portion of our business to be tied to inventory where we bid for ad placements, primarily on sites where we have a first party data advantage.
Historically, we have had a strong record of growing the revenue generated from our digital property partners. We grow our digital property partner relationships in four ways. First, we grow the revenue from these partnerships by increasing our yield over time. We do this by improving our algorithms, expanding our Advertiser base and increasing the amount of data that helps target our ads. Second, we continuously innovate with new product offerings and features that increase revenue. Third, we innovate by launching new advertising formats. Fourth, we work closely with our digital property partners to find new placements and page types where we can help them drive more revenue.
For the majority of our digital properties partners, we have two primary models for sharing revenue with digital property partners. The most common model is a straight revenue share model. In this model, we agree to pay our partner a percentage of the revenue that we generate from advertisements placed on their digital properties. The second model includes guarantees. Under this model, we pay our partners the greater of a fixed percentage of the revenue we generate and a guaranteed amount per thousand page views. In the past, we have and may continue to be required to make significant payments under these guarantees.
Growing Our Advertiser Client Base
We have a large network of Advertisers that wish to achieve specific performance goals, such as obtaining subscribers for email newsletters or acquiring leads for product offerings, across multiple verticals. As we look at growing our advertiser client base, we want to grow the number of advertisers that spend with us at scale. We define a Scaled Advertiser as an Advertiser that has more than $100,000 of cumulative gross spend on the network on a trailing four quarter basis. We had approximately 2,100, 1,800 and 1,800 of Scaled Advertiser clients working with us directly, or through advertising agencies, worldwide during the fourth quarters of 2024, 2023 and 2022, respectively. In an effort to also measure how we are growing our advertising spend with each Scaled Advertiser, we have introduced an Average Revenue per Scaled Advertiser performance measure. Average Revenue per Scaled Advertiser is calculated as the aggregate cumulative gross spend of all Scaled Advertisers for a given period divided by the number of Scaled Advertisers for that period. The Average Revenue per Scaled Advertiser was approximately $199,000, $198,000 and $175,000 during the fourth quarters of 2024, 2023 and 2022, respectively. A large portion of our revenue comes from Scaled Advertisers. The Revenue contribution from Scaled Advertisers represented 85%, 83% and 82% of our Revenues for the fourth quarters of 2024, 2023 and 2022, respectively. These performance Advertisers use our service when they obtain a sufficient return on ad spend to justify their ad spend. We grow the revenue from performance Advertisers in three ways. First, we improve the performance of our network by developing new product features, improving our algorithms and optimizing our supply. Second, we secure increased budgets from existing Advertisers by offering new ad formats and helping them achieve additional goals. Third, we grow our overall Advertiser base by bringing on new Advertisers that we have not worked with previously.
Product and Research & Development
We view research and development expenditures as investments that help grow our business over time. These investments, which are primarily in the form of employee salaries and related expenditures and hardware infrastructure, can be broken into two categories. This first category includes product innovations that extend the capabilities of our current product offerings and help us expand into completely new markets. This includes heavy investment in AI (specifically Deep Learning) in the form of server purchases and expenses for data scientists. This category of investment is important to maintain the growth of the business but can also generally be adjusted up or down based on management’s perception of the potential value of different investment options. The second category of investments are those that are necessary to maintain our core business. These investments include items such as purchasing servers and other infrastructure necessary to handle increasing loads of recommendations that need to be served, as well as the people necessary to maintain the value delivered to our customers and digital property partners, such as investments in code maintenance for our existing products. This type of investment scales at a slower rate than the growth of our core business.
Managing Seasonality
The global advertising industry has historically been characterized by seasonal trends that also apply to the digital advertising ecosystem in which we operate. In particular, advertisers have historically spent relatively more in the fourth quarter of the calendar year to coincide with the year-end holiday shopping season, and relatively less in the first quarter. We expect these seasonality trends to continue, and our operating results will be affected by those trends with revenue and margins being seasonally strongest in the fourth quarter and seasonally weakest in the first quarter.
Privacy Trends and Government Regulation
We are subject to U.S. and international laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, digital advertising and the collection of user data. In addition, large Internet and technology companies such as Google and Apple are making their own decisions as to how to protect consumer privacy, which impacts the entire digital ecosystem. Because we power editorial recommendations, digital properties typically embed our code directly on their web pages. This makes us less susceptible to impact by many of these regulations and industry trends because we are able to drop first party cookies. In addition, because of this integration on our partners’ pages, we have rich contextual information to use to further refine the targeting of our recommendations.
Key Financial and Operating Metrics
We regularly monitor a number of metrics in order to measure our current performance and project our future performance. These metrics aid us in developing and refining our growth strategies and making strategic decisions.
(dollars in thousands, except per share data) Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Revenues $ 1,766,220 $ 1,439,685 $ 1,401,150
Gross profit $ 534,218 $ 425,558 $ 464,253
Net loss $ (3,760) $ (82,040) $ (11,975)
EPS $ (0.01) $ (0.24) $ (0.05)
Ratio of net loss to gross profit (0.7) % (19.3) % (2.6) %
Cash flow provided by operating activities $ 184,331 $ 84,373 $ 53,484
Cash, cash equivalents, short-term deposits and investments $ 230,363 $ 181,833 $ 262,807
Non-GAAP Financial Data (1)
ex-TAC Gross Profit $ 667,496 $ 535,819 $ 569,642
Adjusted EBITDA $ 200,926 $ 98,677 $ 156,676
Non-GAAP Net Income $ 122,377 $ 32,580 $ 91,382
Ratio of Adjusted EBITDA to ex-TAC Gross Profit 30.1 % 18.4 % 27.5 %
Free Cash Flow $ 149,176 $ 52,240 $ 18,570
(1)Refer to “Non-GAAP Financial Measures” below for an explanation and reconciliation to GAAP metrics.
Non-GAAP Financial Measures
We are presenting the following non-GAAP financial measures because we use them, among other things, as key measures for our management and board of directors in managing our business and evaluating our performance. We believe they also provide supplemental information that may be useful to investors. The use of these measures may improve comparability of our results over time by adjusting for items that may vary from period to period or not be representative of our ongoing operations.
These non-GAAP measures are subject to significant limitations, including those identified below. In addition, other companies may use similarly titled measures but calculate them differently, which reduces their usefulness as comparative measures. Non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for GAAP measures. They should be considered as supplementary information in addition to GAAP operating, liquidity and financial performance measures.
ex-TAC Gross Profit
We calculate ex-TAC Gross Profit as gross profit adjusted to add back other cost of revenues and non-cash amortization of the Commercial agreement asset. We add back the non-cash amortization of the Commercial agreement asset because it is unique primarily due to the issuance of equity rather than cash, such that ex-TAC Gross Profit includes solely direct cash contribution components.
We believe that ex-TAC Gross Profit is useful because traffic acquisition cost, or TAC, is what we must pay digital properties to obtain the right to place advertising on their websites, and we believe focusing on ex-TAC Gross Profit better reflects the profitability of our business. We use ex-TAC Gross Profit as part of our business planning, for example in decisions regarding the timing and amount of investments in areas such as infrastructure.
Limitations on the use of ex-TAC Gross Profit include the following:
•Traffic acquisition cost is a significant component of our cost of revenues but is not the only component; and
•ex-TAC Gross Profit is not comparable to our gross profit and by definition ex-TAC Gross Profit presented for any period will be higher than our gross profit for that period.
The following table provides a reconciliation of revenues and gross profit to ex-TAC Gross Profit:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
(dollars in thousands)
Revenues $ 1,766,220 $ 1,439,685 $ 1,401,150
Traffic acquisition cost (1) 1,101,556 903,866 831,508
Other cost of revenues 130,446 110,261 105,389
Gross profit $ 534,218 $ 425,558 $ 464,253
Add back: Other cost of revenues (1) 133,278 110,261 105,389
ex-TAC Gross Profit $ 667,496 $ 535,819 $ 569,642
(1)The year ended December 31, 2024 included $2,832 amortization expense of the non-cash based Commercial agreement asset. See Note 1b of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements.
Adjusted EBITDA and Ratio of Adjusted EBITDA to ex-TAC Gross Profit
We calculate Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss) before finance income (expenses), net, income tax expenses, depreciation and amortization and non-cash amortization of the Commercial agreement asset, further adjusted to exclude share-based compensation including Connexity holdback compensation expenses and other noteworthy income and expense items such as M&A costs and restructuring costs which may vary from period-to-period.
We believe that Adjusted EBITDA is useful because it allows us and others to measure our performance without regard to items such as share-based compensation expense, depreciation and amortization, non-cash amortization of the Commercial agreement asset, and interest expense and other items that can vary substantially depending on our financing and capital structure, and the method by which assets are acquired. We use Adjusted EBITDA and GAAP financial measures for planning purposes, including the preparation of our annual operating budget, as a measure of performance and the effectiveness of our business strategies, and in communications with our board of directors. We may also use Adjusted EBITDA as a metric for determining payment of cash or other incentive compensation.
Limitations on the use of Adjusted EBITDA include the following:
•Although depreciation expense is a non-cash charge, the assets being depreciated may have to be replaced in the future, and Adjusted EBITDA does not reflect cash capital expenditure requirements for such replacements or for new capital expenditure requirements;
•Adjusted EBITDA excludes share-based compensation expense, which has been, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, a significant recurring expense for our business and an important part of our compensation strategy;
•Adjusted EBITDA does not reflect, to the extent applicable for a period presented: (1) changes in, or cash requirements for, our working capital needs; (2) interest expense, or the cash requirements necessary to service interest or if applicable principal payments on debt, which reduces cash available to us; or (3) tax payments that may represent a reduction in cash available to us; and
•The expenses and other items that we exclude in our calculation of Adjusted EBITDA may differ from the expenses and other items, if any, that other companies may exclude from Adjusted EBITDA when they report their operating results.
The following table provides a reconciliation of net income (loss) to Adjusted EBITDA:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
(dollars in thousands)
Net loss $ (3,760) $ (82,040) $ (11,975)
Adjusted to exclude the following:
Finance (income) expenses, net 11,980 12,804 (9,213)
Income tax expenses 17,697 5,499 7,523
Depreciation and amortization (1) 103,722 96,512 91,221
Share-based compensation expenses 60,044 53,749 63,830
Restructuring expenses (2) - - 3,383
Holdback compensation expenses (3) 7,054 10,582 11,091
M&A and other costs (4) 4,189 1,571 816
Adjusted EBITDA $ 200,926 $ 98,677 $ 156,676
(1)The year ended December 31, 2024, includes one-time write-off of internal use software in the amount of $3,038. See Note 9 of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements. The year ended December 31, 2024 included $2,832 amortization expense of the non-cash based Commercial agreement asset. See Note 1b of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements.
(2)Costs associated with the Company’s cost restructuring program implemented in September 2022.
(3)Represents share-based compensation due to holdback of Ordinary shares issuable under compensatory arrangements relating to Connexity acquisition.
(4)The year ended December 31, 2024, includes $1,830 related to excess termination expenses from a headcount reduction due to the launch of Realize, $1,664 in professional and legal expenses related to a litigation matter in which the Company is the plaintiff and is not related to our ongoing business operations and certain one-time professional service costs. The year ended December 31, 2023, includes one-time costs related to the Commercial agreement.
We calculate Ratio of Adjusted EBITDA to ex-TAC Gross Profit as Adjusted EBITDA divided by ex-TAC Gross Profit.
We believe that the Ratio of Adjusted EBITDA to ex-TAC Gross Profit is useful because TAC is what we must pay digital properties to obtain the right to place advertising on their websites, and we believe focusing on ex-TAC Gross Profit better reflects the profitability of our business.
The following table provides a reconciliation of ratio of net income (loss) to gross profit and Ratio of Adjusted EBITDA to ex-TAC Gross Profit:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
(dollars in thousands)
Gross profit $ 534,218 $ 425,558 $ 464,253
Net loss $ (3,760) $ (82,040) $ (11,975)
Ratio of net loss to gross profit (0.7) % (19.3) % (2.6) %
ex-TAC Gross Profit $ 667,496 $ 535,819 $ 569,642
Adjusted EBITDA $ 200,926 $ 98,677 $ 156,676
Ratio of Adjusted EBITDA margin to ex-TAC Gross Profit 30.1 % 18.4 % 27.5 %
Non-GAAP Net Income (Loss)
We calculate Non-GAAP Net Income (Loss) as net income (loss) adjusted to exclude revaluation of our Warrants liability, share-based compensation expense including Connexity holdback compensation expenses, M&A costs and amortization of acquired intangible assets and the non-cash based Commercial agreement asset, foreign currency exchange rate gains (losses), net, and other noteworthy items that change from period to period and related tax effects.
We believe that Non-GAAP Net Income (Loss) is useful because it allows us and others to measure our operating performance and trends without regard to items such as the revaluation of our Warrants liability, share-based compensation expense, cash and non-cash M&A costs including amortization of acquired intangible assets and the non-cash based Commercial agreement asset, foreign currency exchange rate (gains) losses, net and other noteworthy items that change from period to period and related tax effects. These items can vary substantially depending on our share price, acquisition activity, the method by which assets are acquired and other factors.
Limitations on the use of Non-GAAP Net Income (Loss) include the following:
•Non-GAAP Net Income (Loss) excludes share-based compensation expense, which has been, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, a significant recurring expense for our business and an important part of our compensation strategy;
•Non-GAAP Net Income (Loss) will generally be more favorable than our net income (loss) for the same period due to the nature of the items being excluded from its calculation; and
•Non-GAAP Net Income (Loss) is a performance measure and should not be used as a measure of liquidity.
The following table provides a reconciliation of net income (loss) to Non-GAAP Net Income (Loss) for the periods shown*:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
(dollars in thousands)
Net loss $ (3,760) $ (82,040) $ (11,975)
Amortization of acquired intangibles (1) 65,135 63,888 63,557
Share-based compensation expenses 60,044 53,749 63,830
Restructuring expenses (2) - - 3,383
Holdback compensation expenses (3) 7,054 10,582 11,091
M&A and other costs (4) 4,189 1,571 816
Revaluation of Warrants (2,761) (627) (24,471)
Foreign currency exchange rate losses (gains) (5) 5,625 (946) (1,377)
Income tax effects (13,149) (13,597) (13,472)
Non-GAAP Net Income $ 122,377 $ 32,580 $ 91,382
(1)The year ended December 31, 2024, includes one-time write-off of internal use software in the amount of $3,038. See Note 9 of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements. The year ended December 31, 2024 included $2,832 amortization expense of the non-cash based Commercial agreement asset. See Note 1b of Notes to the Unaudited Consolidated Interim Financial Statements.
(2)Costs associated with the Company’s cost restructuring program implemented in September 2022.
(3)Represents share-based compensation due to holdback of Ordinary shares issuable under compensatory arrangements relating to Connexity acquisition.
(4)The year ended December 31, 2024, includes $1,830 related to excess termination expenses from a headcount reduction due to the launch of Realize, $1,664 in professional and legal expenses related to a litigation matter in which the Company is the plaintiff and is not related to our ongoing business operations and certain one-time professional service costs. The year ended December 31, 2023, includes one-time costs related to the Commercial agreement.
(5)Represents foreign currency exchange rate gains or losses related to the remeasurement of monetary assets and liabilities to the Company’s functional currency using exchange rates in effect at the end of the reporting period.
Free Cash Flow
We calculate Free Cash Flow as Net cash flow provided by operating activities minus purchases of property, plant and equipment, including capitalized internal-use software. We expect our Free Cash Flow to fluctuate in future periods as we invest in our business to support our plans for growth.
We believe that Free Cash Flow is useful to provide management and others with information about the amount of cash generated from our operations that can be used for strategic initiatives, including investing in our business, making strategic acquisitions, and strengthening our balance sheet. We expect our Free Cash Flow to fluctuate in future periods as we invest in our business to support our plans for growth.
Limitations on the use of Free Cash Flow include the following:
•it should not be inferred that the entire Free Cash Flow amount is available for discretionary expenditures. For example, cash is still required to satisfy other working capital needs, including short-term investment policy, restricted cash, repayment of loan.
•Free Cash Flow has limitations as an analytical tool, and it should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for analysis of other GAAP financial measures, such as net cash provided by operating activities; and
•This metric does not reflect our future contractual commitments.
The following table provides a reconciliation of net cash provided by operating activities to Free Cash Flow:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
(dollars in thousands)
Net cash provided by operating activities $ 184,331 $ 84,373 $ 53,484
Purchase of property and equipment, including capitalized internal-use software (35,155) (32,133) (34,914)
Free Cash Flow $ 149,176 $ 52,240 $ 18,570
Components of Our Results of Operations
Revenues
All of our Revenues are generated from Advertisers with whom we enter into commercial arrangements, defining the terms of our service and the basis for our charges. Generally, our charges are based on a CPC, CPM or CPA basis. For campaigns priced on a CPC basis, we recognize these Revenues when a user clicks on an advertisement we deliver. For campaigns priced on a CPM basis, we recognize these Revenues when an advertisement is displayed. For campaigns priced on a performance-based CPA basis, the Company generates revenue when a user makes an acquisition.
Cost of revenues
Our cost of revenue primarily includes traffic acquisition cost and also includes other cost of revenue.
Traffic acquisition cost
Traffic acquisition cost, or TAC, consists primarily of cost related to digital property compensation for placing our platform on their digital property and cost for advertising impressions purchased from real-time advertising exchanges and other third parties. Traffic acquisition cost also includes up-front payments, incentive payments, or bonuses paid to the digital property partners and the amortization of the non-cash based Commercial agreement asset (see Note 1b of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements in this Annual Report), which are amortized over the shorter of respective contractual terms and the economic benefit period of the digital property arrangement. For the majority of our digital properties partners, we have two primary compensation models for digital properties. The most common model is a revenue share model. In this model, we agree to pay a percentage of our revenue generated from advertisements placed on the digital properties. The second model includes guarantees. Under this model, we pay the greater of a percentage of the revenue generated or a committed guaranteed amount per thousand page views (“Minimum guarantee model”). Actual compensation is settled on a monthly basis. Expenses under both the revenue share model as well as the Minimum guarantee model are recorded as incurred, based on actual revenues generated by us at the respective month.
Other cost of revenues
Other cost of revenues includes data center and related costs, depreciation expense related to hardware supporting our platform, amortization expense related to capitalized internal-use software and acquired technology, digital and services taxes, personnel costs, and allocated facilities costs. Personnel costs include salaries, bonuses, share-based compensation, and employee benefit costs, and are primarily attributable to our operations group, which supports our platform and our Advertisers.
Gross profit
Gross profit, calculated as revenues less cost of revenues, has been, and will continue to be, affected by various factors, including fluctuations in the amount and mix of revenue and the amount and timing of investments to expand our digital properties partners and Advertisers base. We hope to increase both our Gross profit in absolute dollars and as a percentage of revenue through enhanced operational efficiency and economies of scale.
Research and development
Research and development expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, bonuses, share-based compensation and employee benefits costs, allocated facilities costs, professional services and depreciation. We expect research and development expenses to increase in future periods to support our growth, including continuing to invest in optimization, accuracy and reliability of our platform and other technology improvements to support and drive efficiency in our operations. These expenses may vary from period to period as a percentage of revenue, depending primarily upon when we choose to make more significant investments.
Sales and marketing
Sales and marketing expenses consist of payroll and other personnel related costs, including salaries, share-based compensation, employee benefits, and travel for our sales and marketing departments, advertising and promotion, rent and depreciation and amortization expenses, particularly related to the acquired intangibles. We expect to increase selling and marketing expenses to support the overall growth in our business.
General and administrative
General and administrative expenses consist of payroll and other personnel related costs, including salaries, share-based compensation, employee benefits and expenses for executive management, legal, finance and others. In addition, general and administrative expenses include fees for professional services and occupancy costs. We expect our general and administrative expenses to remain relatively flat in 2025.
Finance income (expenses), net
Finance income (expenses), net, primarily consists of interest income (expense) including amortization of loan and credit facility issuance costs, Warrants liability fair value adjustments, gains (losses) from foreign exchange fluctuations and bank fees.
Income tax benefit (expenses)
The statutory corporate tax rate in Israel was 23% for 2024, 2023 and 2022, although we are entitled to certain tax benefits under Israeli law. See Note 17 of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements in this Annual Report.
Pursuant to the Israeli Law for Encouragement of Capital Investments-1959 (the “Investments Law”) and its various amendments, under which we have been granted “Beneficiary Enterprise” status, we were granted a tax exemption status for the years 2018 and 2019.
For 2021 and subsequent tax years, we adopted The “Preferred Technology Enterprises” (“PTE”) Incentives Regime (Amendment 73 to the Investment Law) granting a 12% tax rate in central Israel on income deriving from benefited intangible assets, subject to a number of conditions being fulfilled, including a minimal amount or ratio of annual research and development expenditure and research and development employees, as well as having at least 25% of annual income derived from exports to large markets. PTE is defined as an enterprise which meets the aforementioned conditions and for which total consolidated revenues of its parent company and all subsidiaries are less than NIS 10 billion.
In the fourth quarter of 2021, the Company utilized a special program initiated by the Israeli Tax Authority allowing Israeli companies to voluntarily release tax-exempted earnings at a reduced tax rate which resulted in GAAP tax expense of $4.4 million.
As of December 31, 2024, we have an accumulated tax loss carry-forward of approximately $23.8 million in Israel and $1.4 million federal tax in the U.S. Those tax losses can be offset indefinitely. Non-Israeli subsidiaries are taxed according to the tax laws in their respective jurisdictions.
The following section discusses our financial condition and results of operations for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023. For a discussion of our financial condition and results of operations for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to the year ended December 31, 2021, refer to Part II, Item 7, “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”, in our Annual Report of Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 13, 2023.
The following table provides consolidated statements of loss data for the periods indicated:
(dollars in thousands) Year ended
December 31, 2024 vs 2023
2024 2023 $ Change % Change
Revenues $ 1,766,220 $ 1,439,685 $ 326,535 22.7 %
Cost of revenues:
Traffic acquisition cost 1,101,556 903,866 197,690 21.9 %
Other cost of revenues 130,446 110,261 20,185 18.3 %
Total cost of revenues 1,232,002 1,014,127 217,875 21.5 %
Gross profit 534,218 425,558 108,660 25.5 %
Operating expenses:
Research and development 142,438 136,255 6,183 4.5 %
Sales and marketing 268,526 246,342 22,184 9.0 %
General and administrative 97,337 106,698 (9,361) (8.8) %
Total operating expenses 508,301 489,295 19,006 3.9 %
Operating Income (loss) 25,917 (63,737) 89,654 (140.7) %
Finance income (expenses), net (11,980) (12,804) 824 (6.4) %
Income (Loss) before income taxes expenses 13,937 (76,541) 90,478 (118.2) %
Income tax expenses (17,697) (5,499) (12,198) 221.8 %
Net loss $ (3,760) $ (82,040) $ 78,280 (95.4) %
Comparison of the Years Ended December 31, 2024 and 2023
Revenues increased by $326.5 million, or 22.7%, for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023. New digital property partners contributed approximately $291.7 million of new Revenues on a 12-month run rate basis calculated based on their first full month on the network, a majority of which is related to Yahoo supply. Existing digital property partners, including the growth of new digital property partners (beyond the revenue contribution determined based on the run-rate revenue generated by the partners when they are first on-boarded) increased by approximately $34.8 million. This increase was primarily driven by continued growth on Yahoo supply partially mitigated by lower advertiser rates on existing digital property partners due to spend being served on new Yahoo supply added to the network.
Cost of revenues increased by $217.9 million, or 21.5%, for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023. Most of the increase in Cost of revenues was driven by Traffic acquisition cost, which increased by $197.7 million, or 21.9%, for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023. The cost of guarantees (total payments due under guarantee arrangements in excess of amounts the Company would otherwise be required to pay under revenue sharing arrangements) as a percentage of traffic acquisition costs were approximately 18% and 19% for the years ended December 31, 2024 and December 31, 2023, respectively.
Gross profit increased by $108.7 million, or 25.5%, for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023.
Ex-TAC Gross Profit, a non-GAAP measure, increased by $131.7 million, or 24.6%, for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023, primarily due to revenue from advertisers transferred from Yahoo, as well as growth in spend from existing Taboola advertisers.
Other cost of revenues increased by $20.2 million, or 18.3%, for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023, mainly due to a $13.9 million increase in data, content, communication and IT related expenses, $3.1 million increase in depreciation expenses related to new product innovation and $2.7 million increase in digital service tax expenses.
Research and development expenses increased by $6.2 million, or 4.5%, for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023, primarily attributable to an increase of $4.4 million in employee and subcontractor headcount and related costs, including share-based compensation expenses, reflecting our continued effort to enhance our product offerings and a $1.7 million increase in depreciation expenses.
Sales and marketing expenses increased by $22.2 million, or 9.0%, for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023, primarily attributed to $24.3 million increase in employee and subcontractor headcount and related costs, including share-based compensation expenses, supporting our growth partially offset by a decrease in amortization expenses of $3.2 million .
General and administrative expenses decreased by $9.4 million, or 8.8%, for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023, primarily attributed to a decrease of $2.3 million in insurance expenses in connection with the Yahoo partnership, a decrease of $2.4 million in credit losses expenses and a decrease of $6.1 million in employee and subcontractors related costs, including share-based compensation expenses, and, partially offset by an increase of $1.0 million in depreciation expenses.
Finance expenses, net decreased by $0.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023, mainly attributable to $2.1 million Warrants liability revaluation and $5.3 million decrease in interest expense due to the voluntary repayments of a portion of the long-term loan in 2024 and lower average interest rates, partially offset by an increase of $6.6 million in Foreign currency exchange rate gains, net.
Income (loss) before income taxes increased by $90.5 million, for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023, as a result of the factors described above.
Tax expense increased by $12.2 million, or 221.8%, for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023. This increase was primarily driven by higher taxable income overall as well as adjustments in deferred tax expenses related to the U.S. entity.
Liquidity and Capital Resources
Our primary cash needs are for working capital, personnel costs, contractual obligations, including payments to digital property partners, office leases and software and information technology costs, capital expenditures for servers and capitalized software development, payment of interest and required principal payments on our long-term loan and other commitments. We fund these cash needs primarily from cash generated from operations, as well as from cash and cash equivalents on our balance sheet when required. We generated cash from operations for the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023, and 2022 of $184.3 million, $84.4 million, and $53.5 million, respectively.
As part of our growth strategy, we have made and expect to continue to make significant investments in research and development and in our technology platform. We also plan to selectively consider possible future acquisitions that are attractive opportunities we deem strategic and value-enhancing. To fund our growth, depending on the magnitude and timing of our growth investments and the size and structure of any possible future acquisition, we may supplement our available cash from operations with issuances of equity or debt securities and/or make other borrowings, which could be material.
As of December 31, 2024 and 2023, we had $230.4 million and $181.8 million of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, respectively, and $1.7 million and $5.7 million in short and long-term restricted deposits, respectively, used, mainly, as security for our lease commitments. Cash and cash equivalents consist of cash in banks and highly liquid marketable securities investments and money market account and funds, with an original maturity of three months or less at the date of purchase and are readily convertible to known amounts of cash. Short-term investments generally consist of U.S. government treasuries, commercial paper, corporate debt securities, and U.S. agency bonds.
We believe that this, together with net proceeds from our engagements with Advertisers and digital property partners, will provide us with sufficient liquidity to meet our working capital and capital expenditure needs for at least the next 12 months. In the future, we may be required to obtain additional equity or debt financing in order to support our continued capital expenditures and operations. In the event that additional financing is required from outside sources, we may not be able to raise it on terms acceptable to us or at all. If we are unable to raise additional capital or generate cash flows necessary to expand our operations and invest in new technologies, this could reduce our ability to compete successfully and harm our business, growth, and results of operations.
On August 9, 2022 we entered into an incremental revolving credit facility amendment to our existing senior secured credit agreement (the “Amended Credit Agreement”). The Amended Credit Agreement provides for borrowings in an aggregate principal amount of up to $90 million (the “Revolving Facility”). The proceeds of the Revolving Facility can be used to finance working capital needs and general corporate purposes. Borrowings under the Revolving Facility are subject to customary borrowing conditions and will bear interest at a variable annual rate based on Term SOFR or Base Rate plus a fixed margin. The Amended Credit Agreement also contains customary representations, covenants and events of default as well as a financial covenant, which places a limit on our allowable net leverage ratio. As of December 31, 2024, we had no outstanding borrowings under the Revolving Facility.
In the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023 we voluntarily prepaid the principal amount of debt outstanding under our long-term loan of $30.0 million and $79.3 million, respectively. We will consider the repurchase and retirement of additional debt based on, among other factors, our working capital and capital expenditures needs, liquidity position and possible alternative uses of cash.
As of December 31, 2024, the outstanding principal amount related to our long-term loan, following the voluntary prepayments, was $122.7 million.
In May 2023, our Board authorized a share buyback program for the repurchase of up to $40.0 million of the Company’s outstanding Shares, with no expiration date (the “Buyback Program”). In November 2023, our Board authorized up to an additional $40.0 million of buybacks under the Buyback Program and in February 2024, the Board authorized up to $100.0 million for use under the Buyback Program, including any remaining authority from the November 2023 Board authorization. As permitted by the Buyback Program, share repurchases may be made from time to time, in privately negotiated transactions or in the open market, including through trading plans intended to comply with Rule 10b5-1, at the discretion of our management and as permitted by securities laws and other legal requirements, including Rule 10b-18 of the Exchange Act. The Buyback Program does not obligate the Company to repurchase any specific number of shares and may be discontinued, modified or suspended at any time.
During the year ended December 31, 2024, we repurchased 18.3 million Shares, consisting of 17.3 million Ordinary shares, and 1.0 million Non-voting Ordinary shares (see Note 18) at an average price of $4.06 per share (excluding broker and transaction fees of $0.4 million). As of December 31, 2024 the Company had remaining authorization to repurchase shares up to an aggregate amount of $45.6 million.
In February 26, 2025, our Board authorized up to an additional $200.0 million for use under the Buyback Program, subject to satisfying required conditions under the Israeli Companies Law and the Companies Regulations.
See Part II, Item 5. Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities and Note 15 of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements in this Annual Report.
Our future capital requirements and the adequacy of available funds will depend on many factors, including the risks and uncertainties set forth under Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors.”
Cash Flows
The following table summarizes our cash flows for the periods indicated:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
(dollars in thousands)
Cash Flow Data:
Net cash provided by operating activities $ 184,331 0 $ 84,373 $ 53,484
Net cash provided by (used in) investing activities (30,109) 0 59,640 (139,561)
Net cash used in financing activities (99,983) 0 (134,614) (62,873)
Exchange rate differences on balances of cash and cash equivalents (3,764) 816 (4,476)
Increase (decrease) in cash and cash equivalents $ 50,475 $ 10,215 $ (153,426)
Operating Activities
During the year ended December 31, 2024, Net cash provided by operating activities of $184.3 million was related to our net loss of $(3.8) million adjusted by positive adjustments of non-cash charges of $173.6 million and net cash inflows of $14.5 million provided by changes in working capital.
The $173.6 million of non-cash charges primarily consisted of depreciation and amortization of $100.9 million and share-based compensation expense related to vested equity awards of $67.1 million, partially offset by $2.8 million of Warrants liability devaluation.
The $14.5 million increase in cash resulting from changes in working capital primarily consisted of a $25.9 million increase in trade payables, $35.6 million increase in accrued expenses and other current liabilities and other long-term liabilities and $28.7 million decrease in prepaid expenses and other current assets and long-term prepaid expenses, partially offset by a $63.8 million increase in trade receivables, net and $9.3 million decrease in deferred taxes, net.
During the year ended December 31, 2023 Net cash provided by operating activities of $84.4 million was related to our net loss of $82.0 million adjusted by positive adjustments of non-cash charges of $161.7 million and net cash outflows of $4.7 million provided by changes in working capital.
The $161.7 million of non-cash charges primarily consisted of depreciation and amortization of $96.5 million and share-based compensation expense related to vested equity awards of $64.3 million.
The $4.7 million increase in cash resulting from changes in working capital primarily consisted of a $36.6 million increase in trade payables, $25.2 million increase in accrued expenses and other current liabilities and other long-term liabilities and $5.9 million decrease in prepaid expenses and other current assets and long-term prepaid expenses, partially offset by a $49.6 million increase in trade receivables, net and $15.5 million decrease in deferred taxes, net.
Investing Activities
During the year ended December 31, 2024, Net cash used by investing activities was $30.1 million, primarily consisting of $35.2 million purchase of property and equipment, including capitalized internal-use software , partially offset by $5.8 million proceeds from maturities of short-term investments.
During the year ended December 31, 2023, Net cash provided by investing activities was $59.6 million, primarily consisting of $114.5 million proceeds from maturities of short-term investments, partially offset by $32.1 million purchase of property and equipment, including capitalized internal-use software and $22.0 million purchase of short-term investments..
Financing Activities
During the year ended December 31, 2024, Net cash used in financing activities was $100.0 million, primarily consisting of $73.6 million repurchase of Shares and a $30.0 million voluntary prepayment of our long-term loan, partially offset by $7.6 million received from exercised options.
During the year ended December 31, 2023, Net cash used in financing activities was $134.6 million, primarily consisting of $82.3 million in repayments of our long-term loan and $55.5 million in repurchases of Ordinary shares, partially offset by $7.0 million received from exercised options.
Contractual Obligations
The following table discloses aggregate information about material contractual obligations and the periods in which they are due as of December 31, 2024. Future events could cause actual payments to differ from these estimates.
Contractual Obligations by Period
2025 2026 2027 2028 Thereafter
(dollars in thousands)
Debt Obligations $ - $ - $ - $ 122,735 $ -
Operating Leases (1) 24,159 19,669 12,614 6,679 8,993
Non-cancellable purchase obligations (2) 35,542 7,845 4,064 21 -
Total Contractual Obligations $ 59,701 $ 27,514 $ 16,678 $ 129,435 $ 8,993
(1)Represents future minimum lease commitments under non-cancellable operating lease agreements.
(2)Primarily represents non-cancellable amounts for contractual commitments in respect of software and information technology.
The commitment amounts in the table above are associated with contracts that are enforceable and legally binding and that specify all significant terms, including fixed or minimum services to be used, fixed, minimum or variable price provisions, and the approximate timing of the actions under the contracts. The table does not include obligations under agreements that we can cancel without a significant penalty. The table above does not reflect any reduction for prepaid obligations as of December 31, 2024. As of December 31, 2024, we have a provision related to unrecognized tax benefit liabilities totaling $10.2 million and other provisions related to severance pay and contribution plans, which have been excluded from the table above as we do not believe it is practicable to make reliable estimates of the periods in which payments for these obligations will be made.
Other Commercial Commitments
In the ordinary course of our business, we enter into agreements with certain digital properties, under which, in some cases we agree to pay them a guaranteed amount, generally per thousand page views on a monthly basis. These agreements could cause a gross loss on digital property accounts in which the guarantee is higher than the actual revenue generated. These contracts generally range in duration from 2 to 5 years, though some can be shorter or longer. These contracts are not included in the table above.
Recent Accounting Pronouncements
See the section titled “Summary of Significant Accounting Policies” in Note 2 of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements in this Annual Report for more information.
Critical Accounting Estimates
Our discussion and analysis of financial condition results of operations are based upon our consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this report. The preparation of our consolidated financial statements in accordance with GAAP requires us to make estimates and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets, liabilities, revenue and expenses. We base our estimates on past experience and other assumptions that we believe are reasonable under the circumstances and we evaluate these estimates on an ongoing basis. Actual results may differ from those estimates.
Our critical accounting policies are those that materially affect our consolidated financial statements and involve difficult, subjective or complex judgments by management. A thorough understanding of these critical accounting policies is essential when reviewing our consolidated financial statements. We believe that the critical accounting policies listed below involve the most difficult management decisions because they require the use of significant estimates and assumptions as described above.
Please see Note 2 of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements included in this Annual Report for a summary of significant accounting policies and the effect on our financial statements.
Revenue Recognition
We recognize revenues when we transfer control of promised services directly to our customers, which we collectively refer to as our Advertisers, in an amount that reflects the consideration to which we expect to be entitled to in exchange for those services.
The determination of whether revenue should be reported gross of amounts billed to Advertisers (gross basis) or net of payments to digital properties partners (net basis) requires significant judgment and is based on management assessment of whether we are acting as the principal or an agent in the transaction. In this assessment, we consider if we obtain control of the specified goods or services before they are transferred to the customer, as well as other indicators such as the party primarily responsible for fulfillment, inventory risk, and discretion in establishing price. The assessment of whether we are considered the principal or the agent in a transaction could impact our revenue and cost of revenue recognized on the consolidated statements of income (loss).
Internal-Use Software Development Costs
Costs incurred to develop internal-use software are capitalized and amortized over the estimated useful life of the software, which is generally three years. In accordance with ASC 350-40, “Internal-Use Software”, capitalization of costs to develop internal-use software begins when preliminary development efforts are successfully completed, we have committed project funding and it is probable that the project will be completed, and the software will be used as intended. Costs related to the design or maintenance of internal-use software are expensed as incurred.
We periodically review internal-use software costs to determine whether the projects will be completed, placed in service, removed from service, or replaced by other internally developed or third-party software. If the asset is not expected to provide any future benefit, the asset is retired, and any unamortized cost is expensed.
When events or changes in circumstances require, we assess the likelihood of recovering the cost of internal-use software. If the net book value is not expected to be fully recoverable, internal-use software would be impaired to its fair value. Measurement of any impairment loss is based on the excess of the carrying value of the asset over the fair value.
Share-Based Compensation
We recognize the cost of share-based awards granted to employees and directors based on the estimated grant-date fair value of the awards. We elected to recognize share-based compensation costs on a straight-line method for awards subject to graded vesting based only on a service condition and the accelerated method for awards that are subject to a performance condition. The compensation expense associated with performance based RSUs is adjusted based on the probability of achieving performance targets. Forfeitures are accounted for as they occur.
For additional information regarding share-based compensation and the assumptions used for determining the fair value of Share options awards, refer to Note 2 and Note 14 of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements in this Annual Report.
Business Combinations
Accounting for business combinations requires us to make significant estimates and assumptions in determining the fair values of assets acquired and liabilities assumed, especially with respect to intangible assets. Critical estimates in valuing the acquired intangible assets include, but are not limited to, the appropriate valuation methodology and the prospective financial information underlying the valuation, e.g., projected revenues, revenues growth rates, operating margins including the appropriate weighted-average cost of capital. Although we believe the assumptions and estimates we have made in the past have been reasonable and appropriate, they are based, in part, on historical experience and information obtained from management of the acquired companies and are inherently uncertain.
Goodwill
Goodwill represents the excess of the aggregate fair value of the consideration transferred in a business combination over the fair value of the assets acquired, net of liabilities assumed. We determine the estimated fair values of assets acquired and liabilities assumed after review and consideration of relevant information including discounted cash flows, quoted market prices, and estimates made by management.
Goodwill is not amortized, but is subject to impairment testing. We test goodwill for impairment as of December 31 of each year, or more frequently if events or changes in circumstances indicate that this asset may be impaired.
For the purposes of impairment testing, we have determined that we have one reporting unit. When performing the annual goodwill impairment testing, we either conduct a qualitative assessment to determine whether it is more likely than not that the asset is impaired, or we elect to bypass this qualitative assessment and perform a quantitative test for impairment. Under the qualitative assessment, we consider both positive and negative factors, including macroeconomic conditions, industry events, financial performance and other changes, and make a determination of whether it is more likely than not that the fair value of goodwill is less than its carrying amount. If, after assessing the qualitative factors, we determine it is more likely than not the asset is impaired, we then perform a quantitative test in which the estimated fair value of the reporting unit is compared with its carrying amount, including goodwill. If a quantitative analysis is necessary, we compare the fair value of our reporting unit to our carrying value. We determine the estimated fair value based on a different approach including income approach (discounted cash flows) and market approach (EV to EBITDA). Market approach and income approach are common measures used to value businesses in our industry. If the estimated fair value exceeds carrying value, goodwill is considered not to be impaired and no additional steps are necessary. However, if the carrying amount exceeds estimated fair value, an impairment loss is recognized in an amount equal to the excess, limited to the amount of goodwill allocated to the reporting unit.
The annual evaluation of goodwill requires the use of estimates about future operating results, valuation multiples, and discount rates to determine their fair value. Changes in these assumptions can materially affect these estimates. Thus, to the extent the revenues volumes deteriorate in the near future, discount rates increase significantly, or we do not meet our projected performance, we could have impairments to record in the next twelve months, and such impairments could be material.
Impairment of long-lived assets
We assess the recoverability of our long-lived assets, whenever events or changes in circumstances indicate that their carrying value may not be recoverable, in accordance with ASC 360, “Property, Plant and Equipment”.
Recoverability of a long-lived asset is measured by comparing the carrying value of the asset group to the projected undiscounted cash flows over their remaining lives. If the carrying value exceeds the projected undiscounted cash flows, an impairment loss is recognized. Impairment equals the amount by which the carrying value exceeds estimated fair value. An impairment loss is charged to consolidated statements of income (loss) in the period in which management determines such impairment.
The preparation of cash flow projections for use in any impairment indicators test or fair value analysis requires management to make critical estimates, judgments and assumptions with regards to estimated future cash flows, as they are, by their nature, subjective and actual results may differ materially from such estimates. Cash flow estimates are unpredictable and inherently uncertain, since they are based on the current regulatory, political and economic climates, recent operating information and projections. Such estimates could be negatively impacted by changes in federal, state or local regulations, economic downturns, competition, events affecting various forms of travel and access to our properties, and other factors. If our estimates of future cash flows are not met or if there are changes in significant assumptions and judgments used in the estimation process, we may have to record impairment charges in the future.
Income Taxes
We are subject to income taxes in Israel, the U.S., and other foreign jurisdictions. Significant judgment is required in determining the provision for income taxes and income tax assets and liabilities, including evaluating uncertainties in the application of accounting principles and complex tax laws. We recognize and measure benefits for uncertain tax positions using a two-step approach. The first step is to determine whether it is more likely than not that a tax position will be sustained upon examination, including the resolution of any related appeals or litigation based on the technical merits of that position. The second step is to measure a tax position that meets the more-likely-than-not threshold to determine the amount of benefit to be recognized in the financial statements. We evaluate uncertain tax positions on a quarterly basis, based upon a number of factors, including changes in facts or circumstances, changes in tax law, correspondence with tax authorities during the course of audits, and effective settlement of audit issues.
Significant judgment is also required in determining any valuation allowance against deferred tax assets. In assessing whether it is more likely than not that some portion or all of the deferred tax assets will not be realized, we consider all available evidence, including projected future taxable income, tax planning strategies, and past operating results. In the event that we change our determination, we will adjust our valuation allowance with a corresponding impact to the provision for income taxes in the period in which such determination is made.

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ITEM 7A. QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE DISCLOSURES ABOUT MARKET RISK
ITEM 7A:QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE DISCLOSURES ABOUT MARKET RISK
Market risk represents the risk of loss that may impact our financial position because of adverse changes in financial market prices and rates. Our market risk exposure is primarily a result of exposure resulting from potential changes in inflation, exchange rates or interest rates. We do not hold financial instruments for trading purposes. We are also subject to the credit risk of counterparties to our various commercial agreements.
Foreign Currency Exchange Risk
A 10% increase or decrease of the NIS, Euro, British pound sterling, or the Japanese yen against the U.S. dollar would have impacted the consolidated statements of loss as follows:
Operating income (loss) impact
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
(dollars in thousands)
+10% -10% +10% -10% +10% -10%
NIS/USD $ (2,157) $ 2,157 $ 1,054 $ (1,054) $ (5,168) $ 5,168
EUR/USD $ 4,703 $ (4,703) $ 923 $ (923) $ 4,177 $ (4,177)
GBP/USD $ (3,319) $ 3,319 $ (663) $ 663 $ (4,143) $ 4,143
JPY/USD $ 989 $ (989) $ 997 $ (997) $ 1,881 $ (1,881)
To reduce the impact of foreign exchange risks associated with forecasted future cash flows related to payroll expenses and other personnel related costs denominated in NIS and their volatility, we have established a hedging program and use derivative financial instruments, specifically foreign currency forward contracts, call and put options, to manage exposure to foreign currency risks. These derivative instruments are designated as cash flow hedges.
Interest Rate Risk
Our cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments are held mainly for working capital purposes. The primary objectives of our investment activities are the preservation of capital and the fulfillment of liquidity needs. We do not enter into investments for trading or speculative purposes. Such interest-earning instruments carry a degree of interest rate risk. Changes in interest rates affect the interest earned on our cash and cash equivalents and short-term investments, and the market value of those securities.
Interest rate risk is the risk that the value or yield of fixed-income investments may decline if interest rates change.
As of December 31, 2024, we had $122.7 million of outstanding borrowings under our long-term loan with a variable interest rate. See Liquidity and Capital Resources for information regarding our incremental revolving credit facility amendment.
Fluctuations in interest rates may impact the level of interest expense recorded on future borrowings. We do not enter into derivative financial instruments, including interest rate swaps, to effectively hedge the effect of interest rate changes or for speculative purposes.
Inflation Risk
We do not believe that inflation has had a material effect on our business, financial condition, or results of operations, other than its impact on the general economy. However, if our costs, in particular labor, sales and marketing, information system, technology and utilities costs, were to become subject to significant inflationary pressures, we might not be able to effectively mitigate such higher costs. Our inability or failure to do so could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Credit Risk
Credit risk with respect to accounts receivable is generally not significant, as we routinely assess the creditworthiness of our partners and Advertisers. Historically, we generally have not experienced any material losses related to receivables from Advertisers during the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022. We do not require collateral. Due to these factors, no additional credit risk beyond amounts provided for collection losses is believed by management to be probable in our accounts receivable. In addition, we try to reduce the credit exposures of our accounts receivable by credit limits and credit insurance for many of our customers. However, there can be no assurance that our efforts to identify potential credit risks will be successful.
Our cash, cash equivalents and restricted deposits are invested in major banks mostly in the United States, United Kingdom and Israel. In the United States and United Kingdom, our deposits are maintained with commercial banks, which are insured by the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”) and Financial Services Compensation Scheme (“FSCS”), which is authorized by the Bank of England (acting in its capacity as the Prudential Regulation Authority), respectively. In Israel, commercial banks do not have government-sponsored deposit insurance. As of December 31, 2024 we maintained cash balances with U.S. and United Kingdom banks that significantly exceed FDIC and FSCS insurance limits and expect we will continue to do so. As of December 31, 2024, we have not experienced credit losses related to these balances. We regularly monitor bank financial strength and other factors in determining where to maintain cash deposits but may not be able to fully mitigate the risk of possible bank failures.
Our short-term investments, which were $3.8 million as of December 31, 2024, are deposited in a major Israeli bank and are not insured or guaranteed.
Our derivatives expose us to credit risk to the extent that the counterparties may be unable to meet the terms of the agreement. We seek to mitigate such risk by limiting our counterparties to major financial institutions and by spreading the risk across a number of major financial institutions. However, failure of one or more of these financial institutions is possible and could result in losses.
We have provided a summary of our significant accounting policies, estimates and judgments in Note 2 of Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements in this Annual Report. The following critical accounting discussion pertains to accounting policies management believes are most critical to the portrayal of our historical financial condition and results of operations and that require significant, difficult, subjective or complex judgments. Other companies in similar businesses may use different estimation policies and methodologies, which may impact the comparability of our financial condition, results of operations and cash flows to those of other companies.

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ITEM 8. FINANCIAL STATEMENTS AND SUPPLEMENTARY DATA
ITEM 8: FINANCIAL STATEMENTS AND SUPPLEMENTARY DATA
Page
Reports of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm (PCAOB ID: 1281)
Consolidated Balance Sheets
Consolidated Statements of Income (Loss)
Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Income (Loss)
Consolidated Statements of Shareholders’ Equity
Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows
Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements
Kost Forer Gabbay & Kasierer Tel: +972-3-6232525
144 Menachem Begin Road, Building A,
Fax: +972-3-5622555
Tel-Aviv 6492102, Israel ey.com
REPORT OF INDEPENDENT REGISTERED PUBLIC ACCOUNTING FIRM
To the Shareholders and the Board of Directors of Taboola.com Ltd.
Opinion on the Financial Statements
We have audited the accompanying consolidated balance sheets of Taboola.com Ltd. (the “Company”) as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, the related consolidated statements of income (loss), comprehensive income (loss), and shareholders’ equity and cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended December 31, 2024, and the related notes (collectively referred to as the “consolidated financial statements”). In our opinion, the consolidated financial statements present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Company at December 31, 2024 and 2023, and the results of its operations and its cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended December 31, 2024, in conformity with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles.
We also have audited, in accordance with the standards of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States) (PCAOB), the Company’s internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2024, based on criteria established in Internal Control-Integrated Framework issued by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (2013 framework), and our report dated February 26, 2025, expressed an unqualified opinion thereon.
Basis for Opinion
These financial statements are the responsibility of the Company’s management. Our responsibility is to express an opinion on the Company’s financial statements based on our audits. We are a public accounting firm registered with the PCAOB and are required to be independent with respect to the Company in accordance with the U.S. federal securities laws and the applicable rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the PCAOB.
We conducted our audits in accordance with the standards of the PCAOB. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement, whether due to error or fraud. Our audits included performing procedures to assess the risks of material misstatement of the financial statements, whether due to error or fraud, and performing procedures that respond to those risks. Such procedures included examining, on a test basis, evidence regarding the amounts and disclosures in the financial statements. Our audits also included evaluating the accounting principles used and significant estimates made by management, as well as evaluating the overall presentation of the financial statements. We believe that our audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinion.
Critical Audit Matter
The critical audit matter communicated below is a matter arising from the current period audit of the financial statements that was communicated or required to be communicated to the audit committee and that: (1) relates to accounts or disclosures that are material to the financial statements and (2) involved our especially challenging, subjective or complex judgments. The communication of the critical audit matter does not alter in any way our opinion on the consolidated financial statements, taken as a whole, and we are not, by communicating the critical audit matter below, providing a separate opinion on the critical audit matter or on the accounts or disclosures to which it relates.
Revenue Recognition-principle versus agent
Description of the Matter As described in Note 2 to the consolidated financial statements, the Company follows the guidance provided in ASC 606, Revenue from Contracts with Customers, for determining whether the Company is the principal or an agent in arrangements with its customers. This determination depends on the facts and circumstances of each arrangement and, in some instances, involves significant judgment. The Company has determined that it acts as principal in the majority of its arrangements because it has the ability to control and direct the specified ad placements before they are transferred to the customers. The Company further concluded that (i) it is primarily responsible for fulfilling the promise to provide the service in the arrangement; and (ii) it has latitude in establishing the contract price with the advertisers. In addition, the Company has inventory risk on a portion of its multi-year agreement with digital properties. For those revenue arrangements where the Company acts as an agent, revenues are recognized on a net basis.
Auditing the Company’s determination of whether revenue should be reported gross of amounts billed to advertisers (gross basis) or net of payments to digital properties partners (net basis) requires a high degree of auditor judgment due to the subjectivity in determining whether the Company is principal in its arrangements. These judgments have a significant impact on the presentation and disclosure of the Company’s revenue in its financial statements.
How We Addressed the Matter in Our Audit Our audit procedures related to the Company’s revenue transactions included, among others, testing the design and operating effectiveness of management’s controls over the determination of principal versus agent recognition in its arrangements with advertisers and digital properties vendors for traffic acquisition, evaluating the Company’s assessment of the indicators of control over the promised service, which included determining whether the Company was primarily responsible for fulfilling the promised service, has discretion in establishing pricing and has inventory risk on a portion of its contracts with digital properties. We also reviewed on a sample basis, the arrangement terms, both with customers and digital properties vendors for traffic acquisition and assessed the impact of those terms and attributes on revenue presentation. In addition, we assessed the appropriateness of the related disclosures in the consolidated financial statements.
/s/ Kost Forer Gabbay & Kasierer
A Member of EY Global
We have served as the Company’s auditor since 2014.
Tel-Aviv, Israel
February 26, 2025
Kost Forer Gabbay & Kasierer Tel: +972-3-6232525
144 Menachem Begin Road, Building A,
Fax: +972-3-5622555
Tel-Aviv 6492102, Israel ey.com
Report of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm
To the Shareholders and the Board of Directors of Taboola.com Ltd.
Opinion on Internal Control Over Financial Reporting
We have audited Taboola.com Ltd’s. internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2024, based on criteria established in Internal Control- Integrated Framework issued by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (2013 framework), (the COSO criteria). In our opinion, Taboola.com Ltd. (the “Company”) maintained, in all material respects, effective internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2024, based on the COSO criteria.
We also have audited, in accordance with the standards of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States) (PCAOB), the consolidated balance sheets of the Company as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, the related consolidated statements of income (loss), comprehensive income (loss), and shareholders’ equity and cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended December 31, 2024, and the related notes and our report dated February 26, 2025, expressed an unqualified opinion thereon.
Basis for Opinion
The Company’s management is responsible for maintaining effective internal control over financial reporting and for its assessment of the effectiveness of internal control over financial reporting included in the accompanying Management’s Annual Report on Internal Control over Financial Reporting. Our responsibility is to express an opinion on the Company’s internal control over financial reporting based on our audit. We are a public accounting firm registered with the PCAOB and are required to be independent with respect to the Company in accordance with the U.S. federal securities laws and the applicable rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the PCAOB.
We conducted our audit in accordance with the standards of the PCAOB. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether effective internal control over financial reporting was maintained in all material respects.
Our audit included obtaining an understanding of internal control over financial reporting, assessing the risk that a material weakness exists, testing and evaluating the design and operating effectiveness of internal control based on the assessed risk, and performing such other procedures as we considered necessary in the circumstances. We believe that our audit provides a reasonable basis for our opinion.
Definition and Limitations of Internal Control Over Financial Reporting
A company’s internal control over financial reporting is a process designed to provide reasonable assurance regarding the reliability of financial reporting and the preparation of financial statements for external purposes in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A company’s internal control over financial reporting includes those policies and procedures that (1) pertain to the maintenance of records that, in reasonable detail, accurately and fairly reflect the transactions and dispositions of the assets of the company; (2) provide reasonable assurance that transactions are recorded as necessary to permit preparation of financial statements in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, and that receipts and expenditures of the company are being made only in accordance with authorizations of management and directors of the company; and (3) provide reasonable assurance regarding prevention or timely detection of unauthorized acquisition, use, or disposition of the company’s assets that could have a material effect on the financial statements.
Because of its inherent limitations, internal control over financial reporting may not prevent or detect misstatements. Also, projections of any evaluation of effectiveness to future periods are subject to the risk that controls may become inadequate because of changes in conditions, or that the degree of compliance with the policies or procedures may deteriorate.
/s/ Kost Forer Gabbay & Kasierer
A Member of EY Global
Tel-Aviv, Israel
February 26, 2025
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
December 31, December 31,
2024 2023
ASSETS
CURRENT ASSETS
Cash and cash equivalents $ 226,583 $ 176,108
Short-term investments 3,780 5,725
Restricted deposits 200 1,407
Trade receivables (net of allowance for credit losses of $11,815 and $10,207 as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively) (1)
370,110 306,307
Prepaid expenses and other current assets 55,328 69,865
Total current assets 656,001 559,412
NON-CURRENT ASSETS
Long-term prepaid expenses 25,193 39,602
Commercial agreement asset 286,619 289,451
Restricted deposits 1,462 4,247
Operating lease right of use assets 58,997 61,746
Property and equipment, net 69,388 72,155
Intangible assets, net 65,067 125,258
Goodwill 555,931 555,931
Total non-current assets 1,062,657 1,148,390
Total assets $ 1,718,658 $ 1,707,802
LIABILITIES AND SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY
CURRENT LIABILITIES
Trade payables (2) $ 309,229 $ 282,012
Short-term operating lease liabilities 21,881 20,264
Accrued expenses and other current liabilities 154,472 118,689
Current maturities of long-term loan - 3,000
Total current liabilities 485,582 423,965
LONG-TERM LIABILITIES
Long-term loan, net of current maturities 116,452 142,164
Long-term operating lease liabilities 42,561 49,450
Warrants liability 3,368 6,129
Deferred tax liabilities, net 5,497 14,815
Other long-term liabilities 13,292 14,217
Total long-term liabilities 181,170 226,775
COMMITMENTS AND CONTINGENCIES (Note 17)
SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY
Ordinary shares with no par value- Authorized: 700,000,000 as of December 31, 2024 and 2023; 325,674,930 and 310,911,091 shares issued, and 293,134,865 and 295,670,620 outstanding as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively
- -
Non-voting Ordinary shares with no par value- Authorized: 46,000,000 as of December 31, 2024 and 2023; 45,198,702 shares issued, and 44,210,406 and 45,198,702 outstanding as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively
- -
Treasury Ordinary shares, at cost - 33,528,361 (32,540,065 Ordinary shares and 988,296 Non-voting Ordinary shares) and 15,240,471 shares as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively
(130,117) (55,513)
Additional paid-in capital 1,335,825 1,262,093
Accumulated other comprehensive income 418 942
Accumulated deficit (154,220) (150,460)
Total shareholders' equity 1,051,906 1,057,062
Total liabilities and shareholders' equity $ 1,718,658 $ 1,707,802
(1) Includes related party trade receivables of $76,677 and $12,297, as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively.
(2) Includes related party trade payables of $68,556 and $38,657, as of December 31, 2024 December 31, 2023, respectively.
The accompanying notes are an integral part of these consolidated financial statements.
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF INCOME (LOSS)
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Revenues (1) $ 1,766,220 $ 1,439,685 $ 1,401,150
Cost of revenues:
Traffic acquisition cost (2) 1,101,556 903,866 831,508
Other cost of revenues 130,446 110,261 105,389
Total cost of revenues 1,232,002 1,014,127 936,897
Gross profit 534,218 425,558 464,253
Operating expenses:
Research and development 142,438 136,255 129,276
Sales and marketing 268,526 246,342 246,803
General and administrative 97,337 106,698 101,839
Total operating expenses 508,301 489,295 477,918
Operating income (loss) 25,917 (63,737) (13,665)
Finance income (expenses), net (11,980) (12,804) 9,213
Income (loss) before income taxes expenses 13,937 (76,541) (4,452)
Income tax expenses (17,697) (5,499) (7,523)
Net loss $ (3,760) $ (82,040) $ (11,975)
Net loss attributable to Ordinary and Non-voting Ordinary shares $ (3,760) $ (82,040) $ (11,975)
Net loss per share attributable to Ordinary and Non-voting Ordinary shareholders, basic and diluted $ (0.01) $ (0.24) $ (0.05)
(1) Includes revenues from related party of $233,640 and $40,902, for the year ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively.
(2) Includes traffic acquisition cost to related party of $275,539 and $45,183, for the year ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively.
CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF COMPREHENSIVE INCOME (LOSS)
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Net loss $ (3,760) $ (82,040) $ (11,975)
Other comprehensive income (loss):
Unrealized gains (losses) on available-for-sale marketable securities, net 6 515 (521)
Unrealized gains (losses) on derivative instruments, net (530) 1,261 (313)
Other comprehensive income (loss) (524) 1,776 (834)
Comprehensive loss $ (4,284) $ (80,264) $ (12,809)
The accompanying notes are an integral part of these consolidated financial statements.
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF SHAREHOLDERS’ EQUITY
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
Non-voting Ordinary shares Ordinary shares Additional paid-in capital Accumulated other comprehensive income (loss) Accumulated deficit Total
shareholders’ equity
Number Amount Number Amount Treasury
Ordinary shares
Balance as of January 1, 2022 0 $ - 234,031,749 $ - $ - $ 824,016 $ - $ (56,445) $ 767,571
Share-based compensation expenses 0 - 0 - - 76,853 - - 76,853
Exercise of options and vested RSUs 0 - 18,875,104 - - 8,671 - - 8,671
Connexity issuance of Holdback 0 - 1,227,010 - - - - - -
Payments of tax withholding for share-based compensation 0 - 0 - - (5,751) - - (5,751)
Other comprehensive loss 0 - 0 - - - (834) - (834)
Net loss 0 - 0 - - - - (11,975) (11,975)
Balance as of December 31, 2022 0 $ - 254,133,863 $ - $ - $ 903,789 $ (834) $ (68,420) $ 834,535
Share-based compensation expenses 0 - 0 - - 66,584 66,584
Repurchase of Ordinary Shares 0 - (15,240,471) - (55,513) - - - (55,513)
Exercise of options and vested RSUs 0 - 16,088,737 - - 7,461 - - 7,461
Connexity issuance of Holdback 0 - 1,162,800 - - - - - -
Issuance of Ordinary shares and Non-voting Ordinary shares related to Commercial agreement 45,198,702 - 39,525,691 - - 288,063 - - 288,063
Payments of tax withholding for share-based compensation 0 - 0 - - (3,804) - - (3,804)
Other comprehensive income 0 - 0 - - - 1,776 - 1,776
Net loss 0 - 0 - - - - (82,040) (82,040)
Balance as of December 31, 2023 45,198,702 $ - 295,670,620 $ - $ (55,513) $ 1,262,093 $ 942 $ (150,460) $ 1,057,062
Share-based compensation expenses 0 - 0 - - 69,254 - 69,254
Repurchase of Ordinary Shares (988,296) - (17,299,594) - (74,604) - - - (74,604)
Exercise of options and vested RSUs 0 - 13,601,042 - - 7,564 - - 7,564
Connexity issuance of Holdback 0 - 1,162,797 - - - - - -
Payments of tax withholding for share-based compensation 0 - 0 - - (3,086) - - (3,086)
Other comprehensive loss 0 - 0 - - - (524) - (524)
Net loss 0 - 0 - - - - (3,760) (3,760)
Balance as of December 31, 2024 44,210,406 $ - 293,134,865 $ - $ (130,117) $ 1,335,825 $ 418 $ (154,220) $ 1,051,906
The accompanying notes are an integral part of these consolidated financial statements.
Table of Content
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS
U.S. dollars in thousands
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Cash flows from operating activities
Net loss $ (3,760) $ (82,040) $ (11,975)
Adjustments to reconcile net loss to net cash flows provided by operating activities:
Depreciation, amortization and write-off 100,928 96,512 91,221
Share-based compensation expenses 67,098 64,331 74,921
Commercial agreement asset amortization 2,832 - -
Net loss (gain) from financing expenses 3,764 (816) 4,476
Revaluation of the Warrants liability (2,761) (627) (24,471)
Amortization of loan and credit facility issuance costs 1,536 1,619 2,009
Amortization of premium and accretion of discount on short-term investments, net 177 (914) (679)
Loss from disposal of property and equipment - 1,571 -
Change in operating assets and liabilities:
Increase in trade receivables, net (1) (63,803) (49,599) (11,242)
Decrease (increase) in prepaid expenses and other current assets and long-term prepaid expenses 28,663 5,934 (10,785)
Increase (decrease) in trade payables (2) 25,920 36,563 (16,825)
Increase (decrease) in accrued expenses and other current liabilities and other long-term liabilities 35,577 25,202 (21,932)
Decrease in deferred taxes, net (9,318) (15,496) (17,329)
Change in operating lease right of use assets 19,914 16,830 15,528
Change in operating lease liabilities (22,436) (14,697) (19,433)
Net cash provided by operating activities 184,331 84,373 53,484
Cash flows from investing activities
Purchase of property and equipment, including capitalized internal-use software (35,155) (32,133) (34,914)
Cash paid in connection with acquisitions, net of cash acquired (719) - (7,981)
Proceeds from (investment in) restricted deposits - (730) 91
Proceeds from maturities of short-term investments 5,765 114,494 29,624
Purchase of short-term investments - (21,991) (126,381)
Net cash provided by (used in) investing activities (30,109) 59,640 (139,561)
Cash flows from financing activities - -
Issuance costs (695) - -
Exercise of options and vested RSUs 7,564 6,953 8,387
Payment of tax withholding for share-based compensation expenses (3,086) (3,804) (5,751)
Repurchase of Ordinary shares (73,602) (55,513) -
Payments on account of repurchase of Ordinary shares (164) - -
Repayment of long-term loan (30,000) (82,250) (64,264)
Costs associated with entering into a revolving credit facility - - (1,245)
Net cash used in financing activities (99,983) (134,614) (62,873)
Exchange rate differences on balances of cash and cash equivalents (3,764) 816 (4,476)
Increase (decrease) in cash and cash equivalents 50,475 10,215 (153,426)
Cash and cash equivalents - at the beginning of the period 176,108 165,893 319,319
Cash and cash equivalents - at the end of the period $ 226,583 $ 176,108 $ 165,893
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Supplemental disclosures of cash flow information:
Cash paid during the year for:
Income taxes $ 19,878 $ 18,011 $ 28,798
Interest $ 14,313 $ 18,488 $ 20,712
Non-cash investing and financing activities:
Purchase of property and equipment, including capitalized internal-use software $ 1,080 $ 639 $ 1,657
Share-based compensation included in capitalized internal-use software $ 2,156 $ 2,253 $ 1,932
Creation of operating lease right-of-use assets $ 17,165 $ 11,730 $ 17,269
Issuance of Ordinary shares and Non-voting Ordinary shares related to Commercial agreement $ - $ 288,063 $ -
Reclassification of Restricted deposit to Short-term deposit
$ 3,780 $ - $ -
(1) Includes an increase in related party trade receivables of $64,380 and $12,297, as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively.
(2) Includes an increase in related party trade payables of $29,899 and $38,657, as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively.
The accompanying notes are an integral part of these consolidated financial statements.
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
NOTES TO THE CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
NOTE 1:- GENERAL
a.Taboola.com Ltd. (together with its subsidiaries, the “Company” or “Taboola”) was incorporated under the laws of the state of Israel on September 3, 2006.
Taboola is a technology company that powers recommendations across the Open Web with an artificial intelligence-based, algorithmic engine developed since the Company began operations in 2007. Taboola partners with websites, devices, and mobile apps (collectively referred to as “digital properties”), to recommend editorial content and advertisements on the Open Web. Digital properties use Taboola’s technology platforms to achieve their business goals, such as driving new audiences to their sites and apps or increasing engagement with existing audiences. Taboola also provides monetization opportunities to digital properties by surfacing paid recommendations by advertisers. Taboola is a business-to-business company with no competing consumer interests. Taboola empowers advertisers to leverage its proprietary AI-powered recommendation platform to reach targeted audiences utilizing effective, native ad-formats across digital properties. As part of the Company e-Commerce offerings, it also syndicates its 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. Taboola generates revenues when people (consumers) click on, purchase from or, in some cases, view the ads that appear within its recommendation platform. The Company’s customers are the advertisers, merchants and affiliate networks that advertise on the Company’s platform (“Advertisers”). Advertisers pay Taboola for those clicks, purchases or impressions, and Taboola shares a portion of the resulting revenue with the digital properties who display those ads.
b.In November 2022, the Company announced it entered into a 30-year exclusive commercial agreement (the “Commercial agreement”) with Yahoo Inc. and affiliated entities (“Yahoo”), under which Taboola will power native advertising across all of Yahoo’s digital properties, expanding the Company’s native advertising offering. In connection with this transaction, and following approval by the Company’s shareholders on December 30, 2022, the articles of association of the Company were amended and restated (the “Articles”) in their entirety to include a Non-voting Ordinary share class with an authorized share capital of 46,000,000. On January 17, 2023 (the “Transaction closing date”), the Company closed the transaction related agreements, including the issuance of 39,525,691 Ordinary shares and 45,198,702 Non-voting Ordinary shares to Yahoo. Based on the closing share price, on January 17, 2023, of $3.40 per share, the aggregate fair value of the issued shares amounted to $288,063. As part of the Ordinary shares and Non-voting Ordinary shares issuance, the Company incurred $1,388 of issuance expenses.
The Non-voting Ordinary shares are not entitled to vote on or receive notices with respect to any matter pursuant to the Company Articles and are not entitled to vote or to be counted for purposes of determining whether any vote required under the Articles has been approved by the requisite percentage of voting securities or to be counted towards any quorum required pursuant to the Articles, except in limited circumstances as permitted in the Articles. Except with respect to the voting rights and to the rights to receive notice of meetings of the shareholders, the Non-voting Ordinary shares have rights identical to the rights of Ordinary shares. In connection with the transaction, the Company and Yahoo entered into an Investor Rights Agreement, under which, inter alia, Yahoo is entitled, in certain circumstances, to cause the Company to register the Ordinary shares issued to Yahoo for resale under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended.
The Company accounts for the consideration paid to Yahoo as an up-front payment for Traffic acquisition costs paid to the digital property partner (the “Commercial agreement asset”), which is amortized over the shorter of respective contractual terms and the economic benefit period of the digital property arrangement, estimated at 18 years.
During the year ended December 31, 2024, the Company concluded it had obtained exclusivity to the extent contemplated by the Commercial agreement as currently in effect, and therefore began to record amortization expenses of the Commercial agreement asset. For the year ended December 31, 2024, the Company recorded $2,832 of amortization expenses of the Commercial agreement asset. For the year ended December 31, 2023, the Company did not record amortization expenses of the Commercial agreement asset.
For related parties see Note 18.
NOTE 2:- SIGNIFICANT ACCOUNTING POLICIES
Basis of Presentation
The accompanying consolidated financial statements have been prepared in accordance with United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (“U.S. GAAP”) and are denominated in U.S. dollars.
Principles of Consolidation
The consolidated financial statements include the accounts of the Company and its wholly owned subsidiaries. All intercompany balances and transactions have been eliminated in consolidation.
Use of Estimates
The preparation of the consolidated financial statements in conformity with the U.S. GAAP requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets and liabilities and disclosure of contingent assets and liabilities at the dates of the consolidated financial statements, and the reported amounts of revenues and expenses during the reporting period and accompanying notes. Actual results could differ from those estimates.
The Company’s management regularly evaluates its estimates, primarily those related to: (1) revenue recognition criteria, including the determination of revenue reporting as gross versus net in the Company’s revenue arrangements, (2) allowances for credit losses, (3) operating lease assets and liabilities, including the incremental borrowing rate and terms and provisions of each lease, (4) the useful lives of its Commercial agreement asset, property and equipment and capitalized software development costs, (5) income taxes, (6) assumptions used in the option pricing models to determine the fair value of share-based compensation (7) the fair value of financial assets and liabilities, including the fair value of marketable securities, Private Warrants and derivative instruments (8) the fair value of acquired intangible assets and goodwill annual impairment test, and (9) the recognition and disclosure of contingent liabilities.
These estimates are based on historical data and experience, as well as various other factors that management believes to be reasonable under the circumstances; the results of which form the basis for making judgments about the carrying value of assets and liabilities that are not readily apparent from other sources.
Functional Currency
The Company’s functional currency is the U.S. dollars (“dollars”), as majority of the Company’s revenues and costs of revenues are denominated in dollars. Accordingly, foreign currency assets and liabilities are remeasured into dollars at the end-of-period exchange rates except for non-monetary assets and liabilities, which are measured at historical exchange rates. Revenue and expenses are remeasured each day at the exchange rate in effect on the day the transaction occurred or the average exchange rate in the month in accordance with ASC 830, “Foreign Currency Matters”. Gains or losses from foreign currency exchange rate re-measurement and settlements are included in finance income (expenses), net in the consolidated statements of income (loss).
Cash and cash equivalents
Cash and cash equivalents consist of cash in banks and highly liquid marketable securities investments, money market account and funds, commercial paper and corporate debt securities, with an original maturity of three months or less at the date of purchase and are readily convertible to known amounts of cash.
Restricted Deposits
The Company’s restricted deposits primarily consist of bank deposits collateralizing the Company’s operating leases.
Fair Value Measurements
Fair value is defined as the exchange price that would be received from the sale of an asset or paid to transfer a liability, considering the principal or most advantageous market in which it would transact and assumptions that market participants would use when pricing the asset or liability, in an orderly transaction between market participants at the measurement date. The Company measures financial assets and liabilities at fair value at each reporting period using a fair value hierarchy which requires the Company to maximize the use of observable inputs and minimize the use of unobservable inputs when measuring fair value. A financial instrument’s classification within the fair value hierarchy is based upon the lowest level of input that is significant to the fair value measurement.
Three levels of inputs may be used to measure fair value:
Level 1 - Observable inputs that reflect quoted prices (unadjusted) for identical assets or liabilities in active markets.
Level 2 - Includes other inputs that are directly or indirectly observable in the marketplace.
Level 3 - Unobservable inputs which are supported by little or no market activity.
Financial instruments consist of cash equivalents, restricted deposits, short-term investments, trade receivables, prepaid expenses and other current assets, trade payables, accrued expenses and other current liabilities, Warrants liability and derivative financial instruments. Short-term investments, Warrants liability and derivative financial instruments are stated at fair value on a recurring basis. Cash equivalents, restricted deposits, trade receivables, prepaid expenses and other current assets, trade payables, accrued expenses and other current liabilities, are stated at their carrying value, which approximates their fair value due to the short time to the expected receipt or payment date.
Derivative Financial Instruments
The Company enters into foreign currency forward and put and call option contracts with financial institutions to protect itself against the foreign exchange risks, mainly exposure to changes in the exchange rate of the New Israeli Shekel (“NIS”) against the U.S. dollar that are associated with forecasted future cash flows related to salary expenses, for up to twelve months, as part of the Company’s risk management strategy. The Company does not enter into derivative transactions for trading or speculative purposes.
In accordance with ASC 815, “Derivatives and Hedging”, the Company recognizes all derivatives on the consolidated balance sheets at fair value. The accounting for changes in the fair value (i.e., gains or losses) of a derivative instrument depends on their intended use and their designation.
For derivative instruments that hedge the exposure to variability in expected future cash flows that are designated as cash flow hedge, changes in the fair value of these derivatives are recorded in accumulated other comprehensive income (loss) as a component of shareholders’ equity in the consolidated balance sheets until the forecasted transaction occurs. Upon occurrence, the Company reclassifies the related gains or losses on the derivative to the same financial statement line item in the consolidated statements of income (loss) to which the derivative relates. In case the Company discontinues cash flow hedges, it records the related amount in finance income (expenses), net, on the consolidated statements of income (loss).
The Company accounts for its derivative financial instruments as either prepaid expenses and other current assets or accrued expenses and other current liabilities in the consolidated balance sheets at their fair value.
Short-term investments
The Company’s short-term investments consist of marketable securities and short-term deposits. The Company classifies its marketable securities as available-for-sale at the time of purchase and reevaluates such classification at each balance sheet date. The Company may sell these securities at any time for use in current operations even if they have not yet reached maturity. As a result, the Company classifies its marketable securities, including those with maturities beyond 12 months, as current assets in the consolidated balance sheets.
The Company carries these securities at fair value and records unrealized gains and losses, net of taxes, in accumulated other comprehensive income (loss) as a component of shareholders’ equity, except for changes in allowance for expected credit losses, which are recorded in finance income (expenses), net.
The Company periodically evaluates its available-for-sale debt securities for impairment. If the amortized cost of an individual security exceeds its fair value, the Company considers its intent to sell the security or whether it is more likely than not that it will be required to sell the security before recovery of its amortized basis. If either of these criteria are met, the Company writes down the security to its fair value and records the impairment charge in finance income (expenses), net, in the consolidated statements of income (loss).
If neither of these criteria are met, the Company determines whether credit loss exists. Credit loss is estimated by considering changes to the rating of the security by a rating agency, any adverse conditions specifically related to the security, as well as other factors.
Realized gains and losses on available-for-sale marketable securities are included in the consolidated statements of income (loss).
Trade Receivables and Allowance for Credit Losses
Trade receivables are recorded at the invoiced amount and amounts for which revenue has been recognized but not invoiced, net of allowance for credit losses. Payment terms and conditions vary by contract type, although terms generally include a requirement to pay within 30 days of the invoice.
The Company’s expected loss allowance methodology for accounts receivable is developed using historical collection experience and current and future economic and market conditions.
The estimate of the amount that may not be collected is based on the geographic location, aging and customer financial condition. Additionally, specific allowance amounts are established to record the appropriate provision for customers that have a higher probability of default. The Company writes-off receivables when they are deemed uncollectible, having exhausted all collection efforts.
Concentrations of Credit Risk
Financial instruments that potentially subject the Company to concentrations of credit risk consist principally of cash, cash equivalents, restricted deposits, short-term investments, trade receivables and other current assets, and derivative instruments.
The Company’s cash, cash equivalents and restricted deposits are invested in major banks mostly in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. The Company maintains cash and cash equivalents with diverse financial institutions and monitors the amount of credit exposure to each financial institution. In the United States and United Kingdom, the Company deposits are maintained with commercial banks, which are insured by the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”) and Financial Services Compensation Scheme (“FSCS”), which is authorized by the Bank of England (acting in its capacity as the Prudential Regulation Authority), respectively. In Israel, commercial banks do not have government-sponsored deposit insurance. As of December 31, 2024, the Company maintained cash balances with U.S. and United Kingdom banks that significantly exceed FDIC and FSCS insurance limits and expect we will continue to do so. As of December 31, 2024, the Company has not experienced credit losses related to these balances.
The Company’s short-term investments consist of marketable securities and short-term bank deposits. Investments in marketable securities are made in instruments with high credit ratings, in accordance with the Company’s investment policy, and are not insured or guaranteed. Short-term bank deposits are held with a major Israeli bank and are not insured or guaranteed.
The Company’s trade receivables are geographically diversified and derived mainly from sales in the United States, Israel, Germany and United Kingdom. Concentration of credit risk with respect to trade receivables is limited by credit limits, ongoing credit evaluation and account monitoring procedures. The Company performs ongoing credit evaluations of its accounts receivables and establishes an allowance for expected losses as necessary.
The Company’s derivatives expose it to credit risk to the extent that the counterparties may be unable to meet the terms of the agreement. The Company seeks to mitigate such risk by limiting its counterparties to major financial institutions and by spreading the risk across a number of major financial institutions.
As of December 31, 2024 and December 31, 2023, no single customer accounted for 10% or more of accounts receivable or total revenue for those respective years then ended, except as disclosed in Note 18.
Leases
The Company accounts for its leases under ASU 2016-02, “Leases”. The Company determines if an arrangement is or contains a lease at inception. The Company has elected not to recognize short-term leases on the balance sheet, nor separate lease and non-lease components and currently does not have any finance leases.
The operating lease right of use assets, or ROU assets, and related lease liability are initially measured at the present value of the future lease payments discounted using the Company’s incremental borrowing rate, because the rate implicit in the Company’s leases is not readily determinable. The Company’s incremental borrowing rate is estimated to approximate the interest rate on similar terms and payments and in economic environments where the leased asset is located.
Some of the Company’s leases contain one or more options to extend. The exercise of lease renewal options is typically at the Company’s sole discretion. The Company considers various factors such as market conditions and the terms of any renewal options that may exist to determine whether it is reasonably certain to exercise the options to extend the lease at lease inception date.
Some of the real estate leases contain variable lease payments, including payments based on a Consumer Price Index (“CPI”). Variable lease payments based on a CPI are initially measured using the index in effect at lease inception, and will not be subsequently adjusted, unless the liability is reassessed for other reasons. Additional payments based on the change in a CPI are recorded as a period expense when incurred.
Property and Equipment
Property and equipment are stated at cost, net of accumulated depreciation. Depreciation is calculated using the straight-line method over the estimated useful lives of the assets at the following annual rates:
Years
Computer equipment and software 3 - 4
Internal-use software 3
Office furniture and equipment 3 - 7
Leasehold improvements Over the shorter of expected lease
term or estimated useful life
Internal-Use Software Development Costs
According to ASC 350-40 the Company capitalizes certain internal-use software development costs associated with creating and enhancing internal-use software related to its platform and technology infrastructure. These costs include personnel and related employee benefits expenses for employees who are directly associated with and who devote time to software projects, and services consumed in developing or obtaining the software.
Capitalized internal-use software is included in property and equipment, net in the consolidated balance sheets. Software development costs that do not meet the criteria for capitalization are expensed as incurred and recorded in research and development expenses in the consolidated statements of income (loss).
Software development activities generally consist of three stages, (i) the planning stage, (ii) the application and infrastructure development stage, and (iii) the post implementation stage. Costs incurred in the planning and post implementation stages of software development, including costs associated with the post configuration training and repairs and maintenance of the developed technologies, are expensed as incurred. Costs incurred in the application and infrastructure development stages, including significant enhancements and upgrades, are capitalized. Capitalization ends once a project is substantially complete, and the software and technologies are ready for their intended purpose.
Internal-use software development costs are amortized using a straight-line method over the estimated useful life of three years, commencing when the software is ready for its intended use.
Business Combinations
The Company records acquisitions based on the fair value of the consideration transferred and then allocates the purchase price to the identifiable assets acquired and liabilities assumed based on their respective fair values as of the acquisition date.
The excess of the value of consideration transferred over the aggregate fair value of those net assets is recorded as goodwill. Any identified definite lived intangible assets will be amortized over their estimated useful lives and any identified intangible assets with indefinite useful lives and goodwill will not be amortized but will be tested for impairment at least annually. When determining the fair value of assets acquired and liabilities assumed, management makes significant estimates and assumptions, including the selection of valuation methodologies, estimates of future revenues and cash flows, discount rates, especially with respect to intangible assets.
Critical estimates in valuing certain intangible assets include, but are not limited to, future expected cash flows from customer relationships, merchant/network affiliate relationships, publisher relationships, technology, tradenames and discount rates. The Company estimates fair value based upon assumptions that are believed to be reasonable, but which are inherently uncertain and unpredictable and, as a result, actual results may differ from estimates.
Upon the conclusion of the measurement period or final determination of the fair value of assets acquired or liabilities assumed, whichever comes first, any subsequent adjustments are recorded to the Company’s consolidated statements of income (loss).
Acquisition-related transaction costs are not included as a component of consideration transferred, but are accounted for as an expense in the period in which the costs are incurred.
Intangible Assets
Intangible assets consist of identifiable intangible assets that the Company has acquired from previous business combinations. Intangible assets are recorded at fair value, net of accumulated amortization. The Company amortizes its intangible assets reflecting the pattern in which the economic benefits of the intangible assets are consumed. When a pattern cannot be reliably determined, the Company uses a straight-line amortization method. Each period the Company evaluates the estimated remaining useful lives of its intangible assets and whether events or changes in circumstances require a revision to the remaining period of amortization.
The estimated useful lives of the Company’s intangible assets are as follows:
Years
Merchant / Network affiliate relationships 4.5
Publisher relationships 4
Tradenames 2 - 3
Technology 4 - 5
Customer relationships 5 - 9
Impairment of Long-Lived Assets
The Company assesses the recoverability of its long-lived assets, whenever events or changes in circumstances indicate that their carrying value may not be recoverable, in accordance with ASC 360, “Property, Plant and Equipment”. Recoverability of a long-lived asset is measured by comparing the carrying value of the asset group to the projected undiscounted cash flows over their remaining lives. If the carrying value exceeds the projected undiscounted cash flows, an impairment loss is recognized. Impairment equals the amount by which the carrying value exceeds estimated fair value. An impairment loss is charged to consolidated statements of income (loss) in the period in which management determines such impairment.
During the year ended December 31, 2024, the Company recognized a write-off of internal use software totaling $3,038. There was no impairment of long-lived assets in the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022.
Goodwill
Goodwill represents the excess of the aggregate fair value of the consideration transferred in a business combination over the fair value of the assets acquired, net of liabilities assumed. Goodwill is not amortized, but is subject to impairment testing at the reporting unit level conducted annually on December 31, or more frequently if events or changes in circumstances indicate that goodwill may be impaired. The Company identified a single reporting unit for the purpose of goodwill impairment testing.
There was no impairment of goodwill in the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022.
Segment Information
The Company operates in one operating and reportable segment. Operating segments are defined as components of an enterprise about which separate financial information is evaluated regularly by the Chief Operating Decision Maker (“CODM”), who is the Company’s Chief Executive Officer (“CEO”), in deciding how to allocate resources and assessing performance. The CODM allocates resources and assesses performance based upon discrete financial information at the consolidated level.
Consolidated net income in the consolidated statements of income (loss) is the measure of financial profit and loss most closely aligned with generally accepted accounting principles that is used by the CEO to assess performance and resource allocation.
Further, the CODM reviews and utilizes functional expenses (Traffic acquisition cost, Other cost of revenues, sales and marketing, research and development, and general and administrative) at the consolidated level to manage the Company’s operations.
Revenue Recognition
Under ASC 606, “Revenues from Contracts with Customers”, the Company recognizes revenue when its customer obtains control of promised goods or services in an amount that reflects the consideration that the Company expects to receive in exchange for those goods or services. To determine revenue recognition for contracts that are within the scope of the standard, the Company performs the following five steps:
i.Identify the contract with a customer;
ii.Identify the performance obligations in the contract, including whether they are distinct in the context of the contract;
iii.Determine the transaction price, including the constraint on variable consideration;
iv.Allocate the transaction price to the performance obligations in the contract;
v.Recognize revenue as the Company satisfies the performance obligations.
The Company generates revenues when people click on, purchase from or, in some cases, view the ads that appear within its recommendation platform. The Company’s customers are the advertisers, agencies, merchants and affiliate networks that advertise on the Company’s platform (collectively, “Advertisers”). Advertisers pay Taboola for those clicks, purchases or impressions and Taboola generally shares the resulting revenue with the digital properties who display those ads.
Advertisers accept the Company’s terms of service upon signature on an IO (insertion order) or any applicable form and registration to the platform.
-For campaigns priced on a cost-per-click (“CPC”) basis, the Company bills the customers and recognizes revenues when a user clicks on an advertisement displayed.
-For campaigns priced on a cost-per-thousand impression basis (“CPM”), the Company bills the customers and recognizes revenues based on the number of times an advertisement is displayed to a user.
-For campaigns priced on a performance-based cost-per-action (“CPA”) basis, the Company bills the customers and recognizes revenues when a user makes an acquisition.
The determination of whether revenue should be reported gross of amounts billed to Advertisers (gross basis) or net of payments to digital properties partners (net basis) requires significant judgment and is based on management assessment of whether the Company is acting as the principal or an agent in the transaction. The Company has determined that in certain arrangements it acts as principal because it has the ability to direct the services to its customers, while in others it does not.
On revenues presented on a gross basis the Company has contracts with its digital properties that provide exclusivity and cover multiple years at inception. These agreements typically require that the Company’s code be integrated on the digital property web page. Thus, in the vast majority of the Company’s business, it does not bid for an ad placement, but rather it controls the specified pages before they are transferred to the customer, sees all users that visit the respective pages and is able to run a predictive auction and direct the ad placement to the relevant customer. The Company further concluded that (i) the Company is primarily responsible for fulfilling the promise to provide the service in the arrangement and controls what recommendations to place; (ii) the Company has latitude in establishing the contract price with the advertisers, and (iii) the Company has inventory risk on a portion of its multi-year agreement with digital properties. Therefore, based on these and other factors, the Company reports revenue earned on a gross basis.
For those revenue arrangements where the Company does not control the advertising inventory before it is transferred to its Advertisers, does not have inventory risks as the Company does not purchase the advertising inventory upfront or has limited discretion in establishing prices, the Company believes it acts as an agent and recognizes revenue and related costs incurred on a net basis.
Revenue is recognized net of any taxes collected from customers which are subsequently remitted to governmental entities.
Trade receivables are recorded at the amount of gross billings the Company is responsible to collect, trade payables, representing liabilities towards digital properties, are recorded at the amount payable to publishers.
Practical Expedients
The Company does not disclose the value of unsatisfied performance obligations for (i) contracts with an original expected length of one year or less and (ii) contracts for which the Company recognizes revenue at the amount to which it has the right to invoice for services performed.
Additionally, the Company has elected to apply the practical expedient such that it does not evaluate payment terms of one year or less for the existence of a significant financing component.
The Company generally expenses sales commissions when incurred because the amortization period would have been one year or less. These costs are recorded within sales and marketing expenses.
Cost of Revenues
The Company’s cost of revenue primarily includes Traffic acquisition costs and other cost of revenue.
Traffic Acquisition Cost: Traffic acquisition cost, or TAC, consists primarily of cost related to digital property compensation for placing Taboola’s platform on their digital property and cost for advertising impressions purchased from real-time advertising exchanges and other third parties. Traffic acquisition cost also includes up-front payments, incentive payments, or bonuses paid to the digital property partners, which are amortized over the shorter of respective contractual terms and the economic benefit period of the digital property arrangement. Taboola has two primary compensation models for digital properties. The most common model is a revenue share model. In this model, Taboola agrees to pay a fixed percentage of the revenue that it generates from advertisements placed on the digital properties.
The second model includes guarantees. Under this model, Taboola mostly pays a greater of a fixed percentage of the revenue generated and a committed guaranteed amount per thousand page views (“Minimum guarantee model”). Actual compensation is settled on a monthly basis. Expenses under both the revenue share model as well as the Minimum guarantee model are recorded as incurred, based on actual revenues generated by Taboola at the respective month.
Other cost of revenue: Other cost of revenue primarily consists of data center and related costs, depreciation expense related to hardware supporting Taboola’s platform, amortization expense related to capitalized internal-use software and acquired intangibles, personnel costs, and allocated facilities costs. Personnel costs include salaries, bonuses, share-based compensation, and employee benefit costs, and are primarily attributable to the operations group, which supports the Company’s platform and clients.
Research and Development
Research and development expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, bonuses, share-based compensation and employee benefits costs, allocated facilities costs, professional services and depreciation.
Warrants Liability
The Company evaluated the Public Warrants and Private Warrants (collectively: “Warrants”) in accordance with ASC 815-40, ‘‘Derivatives and Hedging- Contracts in Entity’s Own Equity’’, and concluded that a provision in the Warrants Agreement related to certain tender or exchange offers, as well as provisions that provided for potential changes to the settlement amounts dependent upon the characteristics of the holder of the warrant, preclude the Warrants from being accounted for as components of equity.
As the Warrants meet the definition of a derivative as contemplated in ASC 815 and are not eligible for an exception from derivative accounting, the Warrants are recorded as derivative liabilities in the consolidated balance sheets and measured at fair value at inception (on June 29, 2021, the date of the Business Combination) and at each reporting period in accordance with ASC 820, ‘‘Fair Value Measurement’’, with changes in fair value presented within finance income (expense), net in the consolidated statements of income (loss) in the period of change.
The Private Warrants were classified as Level 3 at the initial measurement date due to the use of unobservable inputs.
The key inputs into the Black-Scholes model for the Private Warrants as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, were as follows:
Input December 31,
2024 2023
Risk-free interest rate 4.11 % - 4.12% 4.04 % - 4.28%
Expected term (years) 0.75 - 1.49 1.75 - 2.5
Expected volatility 39.7 % - 76.5% 61.1 % - 63.9%
Exercise price $11.50 $11.50
Underlying stock price $3.65 $4.33
The Company’s use of a Black-Scholes model required the use of subjective assumptions:
•The risk-free interest rate assumption was interpolated based on constant maturity U.S. Treasury rates over a term commensurate with the expected term of the Private Warrants.
•The expected term was based on the maturity of the Private Warrants of five years following June 29, 2021, the Business Combination date, and for certain Private Warrants the maturity was determined to be five years from the date of the October 1, 2020, ION initial public offering effective date.
•The expected share volatility assumption was based on the implied volatility from a set of comparable publicly-traded companies as determined based on size and proximity, for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022
•For the year ended December 31, 2024, volatility is calculated as the standard deviation of continuously compounded returns for Taboola’s common stock, using a look back period commensurate with the remaining term of each respective warrant, with the exception of the Public Warrants for which the volatility is determined iteratively to calibrate to the traded price.
Share-Based Compensation
Share-based compensation expense related to share-based awards is recognized based on the fair value of the awards granted and recognized as an expense over the requisite service period for share options and RSUs. The Company elects the straight-line recognition method for awards subject to graded vesting based only on a service condition and implements the accelerated method for awards that are subject to a performance condition. The compensation expense associated with performance based RSUs is adjusted based on the probability of achieving performance targets. Forfeitures are accounted for as they occur.
The fair value of each option award is estimated on the grant date using the Black-Scholes option pricing model. The Black-Scholes option pricing model requires the input of highly subjective assumptions, including the fair value of the underlying ordinary shares, the expected term of the award, the expected volatility of the price of the Company’s ordinary shares, risk-free interest rates, and the expected dividend yield of ordinary shares. The fair value of each RSU award is based on the fair value of the underlying ordinary shares on the grant date. The assumptions used to determine the fair value of the share awards represent management’s best estimates. These estimates involve inherent uncertainties and the application of management’s judgment.
The fair value of each option award is estimated using the following assumptions:
Year ended
December 31,
Volatility 66.0 % - 66.9%
Risk-free interest rate 1.86 % - 3.78%
Dividend yield 0 % - 0%
Expected term (in years) 5.49 - 6.1
The Company did not grant options awards during the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023.
These assumptions and estimates were determined as follows:
Fair Value of Ordinary Shares is determined by the closing price of the Company’s Ordinary shares as reported on the date of grant.
The risk-free rate for the expected term of the options is based on the yields of the U.S. Treasury securities with maturities appropriate for the expected term of employee share option awards.
The expected term represents the period that options are expected to be outstanding. The Company determines the expected term using the simplified method. The simplified method deems the term to be the average of the time-to-vesting and the contractual life of the options.
Since the Company has a limited trading history of its Ordinary shares, the expected volatility is derived from the average historical share volatilities based on peer group public companies that the Company considers to be comparable to its own business over a period equivalent to the option’s expected term.
The Company has never declared or paid any cash dividends and does not presently plan to pay cash dividends in the foreseeable future. As a result, an expected dividend yield of zero percent was used.
Income taxes
The Company is subject to income taxes in Israel, the U.S., and other foreign jurisdictions. These foreign jurisdictions may have different statutory rates than in Israel. Income taxes are accounted for in accordance with ASC 740, “Income Taxes”. Deferred tax assets and liabilities are recognized for the future tax consequences attributable to differences between the financial statements carrying amounts of existing assets and liabilities and their respective tax basis as well as operating loss and tax credit carryforwards. Deferred tax assets and liabilities are measured using enacted tax rates expected to apply to taxable income in the years in which those temporary differences are expected to be recovered or settled.
The financial effect of changes in tax laws or rates is accounted for in the period of enactment. Valuation allowances are provided when necessary to reduce deferred tax assets to the amount expected to be realized.
The Company recognizes income tax benefits from uncertain tax positions only if it believes that it is more likely than not that the tax position will be sustained upon examination by the taxing authorities based on the technical merits of the position. The tax benefits recognized in the financial statements from such uncertain tax positions are then measured based on the largest benefit that is more likely than not to be realized upon the ultimate settlement. Although the Company believes that it has adequately reserved for its uncertain tax positions, it can provide no assurance that the final tax outcome of these matters will not be materially different. The Company makes adjustments to these reserves when facts and circumstances change, such as the closing of a tax audit or the refinement of an estimate. To the extent that the final tax outcome of these matters is different from the amounts recorded, such differences will affect the provision for income taxes in the period in which such determination is made. The Company classifies interest and penalties on income taxes (which includes uncertain tax positions) as taxes on income.
Loss Contingency
The Company evaluates the likelihood of an unfavorable outcome in legal or regulatory proceedings to which it is a party and records a loss contingency when it is probable that a liability has been incurred and the amount of the loss can be reasonably estimated. These judgments are subjective, based on the status of such legal or regulatory proceedings, the merits of the Company’s defenses and consultation with corporate and external legal counsel. Actual outcomes may differ materially from the Company’s estimates. Legal costs associated with the proceedings are expensed as incurred.
Treasury Ordinary Shares
The Company may repurchase its Ordinary shares and Non-voting Ordinary shares from time to time in the open market, or in other transactions, and holds such shares as treasury Ordinary shares. The Company presents the cost to repurchase treasury Ordinary shares as a separate component and as a reduction of shareholders’ equity.
The Company may reissue treasury Ordinary shares from time to time for various corporate purposes, including in connection with compensatory awards.
Net income (loss) Per Share Attributable to Ordinary and Non-voting Ordinary Shareholders
The Company calculates basic net income (loss) per share by dividing the net income (loss) by the weighted-average number of Ordinary shares and Non-voting Ordinary shares outstanding during the period. Diluted net income (loss) per share is computed by giving effect to all potentially dilutive securities outstanding for the period. Diluted net loss per share was the same as basic net loss per share in periods when the effects of potentially dilutive securities were anti-dilutive.
Recently Issued Accounting Pronouncements
In December 2023, the FASB issued ASU 2023-09 “Income Taxes (Topics 740): Improvements to Income Tax Disclosures”, which expands the disclosure requirements for income taxes, primarily related to the rate reconciliation and income taxes paid. This ASU is effective for the fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2024. Early adoption permitted. The Company is currently evaluating the impact of this guidance on its consolidated financial statement and related disclosures and will adopt the guidance effective January 1, 2025.
In November 2024, the FASB issued ASU 2024-03, Income Statement-Reporting Comprehensive Income-Expense Disaggregation Disclosures (Subtopic 220-40): Disaggregation of Income Statement Expenses, requiring public entities to disclose additional information about specific expense categories in the notes to the financial statements on an interim and annual basis. ASU 2024-03 is effective for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2026, and for interim periods beginning after December 15, 2027, with early adoption permitted. The Company is currently evaluating the impact of adopting ASU 2024-03.
Recently Adopted Accounting Pronouncements:
In November 2023, the FASB issued ASU 2023-07, “Segment Reporting (Topic 280): Improvements to Reportable Segment Disclosures”, which expands the annual and interim disclosure requirements for public company reportable segments, primarily through enhanced information about the significant expenses. This ASU is effective for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2023, and for interim periods within fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2024. The Company adopted this guidance in this Annual Report on Form 10-K in its Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements. The disclosures are included in Note 19 - “Segments and Geographic Information”. There was no impact to the Company’s consolidated balance sheets, consolidated statements of income (loss), consolidated statements of stockholders’ equity or consolidated statements of cash flows.
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
NOTES TO THE CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
NOTE 3:- CASH AND CASH EQUIVALENTS
The following table presents for each reported period, the breakdown of cash and cash equivalents:
December 31,
2024 2023
Cash $ 154,962 $ 99,811
Money market accounts and funds 70,692 72,510
Time deposits 929 3,787
Total Cash and cash equivalents $ 226,583 $ 176,108
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
NOTES TO THE CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
NOTE 4:- FAIR VALUE MEASUREMENTS
The Company evaluates assets and liabilities subject to fair value measurements on a recurring basis to determine the appropriate level to classify them for each reporting period. The Company did not have any transfers between fair value measurements levels in the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023.
The following table sets forth the Company’s assets and liabilities that were measured at fair value as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, by level within the fair value hierarchy:
Fair Value Hierarchy Fair value measurements as of
Description December 31, 2024 December 31, 2023
Assets:
Cash equivalents:
Money market accounts and funds Level 1 $ 70,692 $ 72,510
Short-term investments:
Short-term deposits Level 2 $ 3,780 $ -
Corporate debt securities Level 2 $ - $ 3,651
Commercial paper Level 2 $ - $ 2,074
Derivative instruments asset:
Derivative instruments designated as cash flow hedging instruments Level 2 $ 468 $ 948
Liabilities:
Warrants liability:
Public Warrants Level 1 $ (3,302,613) $ (4,253)
Private Warrants Level 3 $ (65,143) $ (1,876)
Derivative instruments liability:
Derivative instruments designated as cash flow hedging instruments Level 2 $ (50) $ -
The Company classifies its money market accounts and funds as Level 1 based on quoted market prices in active markets.
The Company classifies its short-term investments and derivative instruments within Level 2 as they are valued using inputs other than quoted prices which are directly or indirectly observable in the market, including readily-available pricing sources for the identical underlying security which may not be actively traded.
The Company measures the fair value for Warrants by using a quoted price for the Public Warrants, which are classified as Level 1, and a Black-Scholes simulation model for the Private Warrants, which are classified as Level 3, due to the use of unobservable inputs.
The following table presents the changes in the fair value of Warrants liability:
Private Public Total
Input Warrants Warrants Warrants
Fair value as of December 31, 2023 $ 1,876 $ 4,253 $ 6,129
Change from private to public holdings (130) 130 -
Change in fair value (1,681) (1,080) (2,761)
Fair value as of December 31, 2024 $ 65 $ 3,303 $ 3,368
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
NOTES TO THE CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
NOTE 5:- SHORT-TERM INVESTMENTS
The Company short-term investments, which were $3,780 as of December 31, 2024, are composed of short-term bank deposits.
The following is a summary of available-for-sale marketable securities as of December 31, 2023:
December 31, 2023
Amortized cost Gross Unrealized Gains Gross Unrealized Losses Fair value
Corporate debt securities $ 3,654 $ - $ (3) $ 3,651
Commercial paper 2,077 - (3) 2,074
Total $ 5,731 $ - $ (6) $ 5,725
As of December 31, 2023, the unrealized losses related to marketable securities (which were accumulated in a period of less than 12 months) were not due to credit losses, and therefore, the Company did not record an allowance for credit losses for its available-for-sale marketable securities.
NOTE 6:- DERIVATIVE INSTRUMENTS AND HEDGING ACTIVITIES
The Company records all cash flow hedging instruments on the consolidated balance sheets at fair value. The fair values of outstanding derivative instruments designated as cash flow hedging instruments were as follows:
December 31,
2024 2023
Prepaid expenses and other current assets $ 468 $ 948
Accrued expenses and other current liabilities $ 50 $ -
As of December 31, 2024 and 2023, the notional amounts of the Company’s derivative instruments designated as cash flow hedging instruments outstanding in U.S. dollars amounted to $49,502 and $39,347, respectively.
Effect of Foreign Currency Contracts on the Consolidated Statements of loss
The effect of foreign currency contracts designated as cash flow hedge on the consolidated statements of income (loss), for the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, were as follows:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Cost of revenues $ 18 $ (155) $ (450)
Research and development 199 (1,619) (3,244)
Sales and marketing 50 (305) (620)
General and administrative 40 (296) (538)
Total gains (losses) recognized in the consolidated statements of loss, net $ 307 $ (2,375) $ (4,852)
Effect of Foreign Currency Contracts on Accumulated Other Comprehensive Income (Loss)
Net unrealized gains (losses) of foreign currency contracts designated as cash flow hedging instruments are recorded in accumulated other comprehensive income (loss).
The changes in unrealized gains (losses) on the Company’s derivative instruments recorded in accumulated other comprehensive income (loss) were as follows:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Unrealized losses on derivative instruments, beginning of period $ 948 $ (313) $ -
Changes in fair value of derivative instruments (223) (1,114) (5,165)
Reclassification of gains (losses) recognized in the consolidated statements of income (loss) from accumulated other comprehensive income (loss) (307) 2,375 4,852
Unrealized gains (losses) on derivative instruments, end of period $ 418 $ 948 $ (313)
All net deferred gains (losses) in accumulated other comprehensive income (loss) as of December 31, 2024, are expected to be recognized over the next twelve months as operating expenses in the same financial statement line item in the consolidated statements of income (loss) to which the derivative relates.
NOTE 7:- BUSINESS COMBINATION
Gravity R&D Zrt.
In July 2022, the Company completed the acquisition of Gravity R&D Zrt. (“Gravity R&D”) a privately-held company based in Budapest, Hungary, which provides personalization recommendation services, for a total consideration of $7,035, net of cash acquired. As part of a purchase price allocation, $1,780 was attributed to identified intangible assets and $5,925 to goodwill. Goodwill is not deductible for income tax purposes.
In 2022, total acquisition-related transaction costs of $742 were incurred in relation to the acquisition, which were recognized as an expense and included in general and administrative expenses in the consolidated statements of loss.
The results of Gravity R&D operations were consolidated in the Company’s consolidated financial statements commencing on the date of the acquisition and were immaterial to the Company’s results of operations for the year ended December 31, 2022. Pro forma information has not been provided, since the impact of Gravity R&D’s financial results were immaterial to the revenue and net loss of the Company.
NOTE 8:- PREPAID EXPENSES AND OTHER CURRENT ASSETS
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023
Prepaid expenses $ 38,185 $ 48,878
Government institutions 11,836 10,691
Derivative instruments 468 948
Other current asset 4,839 9,348
Total prepaid expenses and other current assets $ 55,328 $ 69,865
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
NOTES TO THE CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
NOTE 9:- PROPERTY AND EQUIPMENT, NET
Property and equipment, net consist of the following:
December 31,
2024 2023
Computer and equipment and software $ 210,927 $ 192,555
Internal-use software 72,024 62,864
Leasehold improvements 18,790 18,926
Office furniture and equipment 3,821 3,679
Property and equipment, gross 305,563 278,024
Less accumulated depreciation (236,175) (205,869)
Property and equipment, net $ 69,388 $ 72,155
The Company capitalized internal-use software costs of $15,665 and $14,431 for the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively. The Company’s capitalized internal-use software amortization is included in cost of revenues in the Company’s consolidated statements of income (loss) and totaled to $17,263, $12,446 and $5,422 for the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, respectively.
Total depreciation expenses (including amortization of internal-use software) for the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, were $37,335, $32,624 and $27,664, respectively.
For the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, the Company wrote off fully depreciated property and equipment, which were no longer in use, with a cost basis of $7,147, $6,599 and $2,393, respectively.
During the fiscal year ended December 31, 2024, the Company recognized a one-time write-off of internal use software totaling $3,038. In the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023, and December 31, 2022, the Company did not record any write-offs related to internal us software.
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
NOTES TO THE CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
NOTE 10:- GOODWILL AND INTANGIBLE ASSETS, NET
Goodwill
As of December 31, 2024 and 2023 the carrying amount of the Company's total goodwill was $555,931
Intangible Assets, Net
Definite-lived intangible assets, net consist of the following:
Gross Fair Accumulated Net Book
December 31, 2024 Value Amortization Value
Merchant/Network affiliate relationships $ 146,547 $ (108,558) $ 37,989
Technology 74,193 (55,039) 19,154
Publisher relationships 42,934 (35,778) 7,156
Tradenames 24,097 (24,097) -
Customer relationship 13,473 (12,705) 768
Total $ 301,244 $ (236,177) $ 65,067
Gross Fair Accumulated Net Book
December 31, 2023 Value Amortization Value
Merchant/Network affiliate relationships $ 146,547 $ (75,987) $ 70,560
Technology 74,193 (43,535) 30,658
Publisher relationships 42,933 (25,044) 17,889
Tradenames 24,097 (18,739) 5,358
Customer relationship 13,146 (12,353) 793
Total $ 300,916 $ (175,658) $ 125,258
Amortization expenses for intangible assets were $60,518, $63,888 and $63,557 for the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, respectively.
The estimated future amortization expense of definite-lived intangible assets as of December 31, 2024, is as follows:
Year Ending December 31,
2025 $ 51,407
2026 13,291
2027 135
Thereafter 234
Total $ 65,067
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
NOTES TO THE CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
NOTE 11:- ACCRUED EXPENSES AND OTHER CURRENT LIABILITIES
December 31,
2024 2023
Employees and related benefits $ 51,543 $ 42,976
Accrued expenses 30,740 20,782
Government authorities 32,252 19,038
Advances from customers 10,599 15,008
Accrued vacation pay 14,276 12,659
Derivative instruments 50 -
Other 15,012 8,226
Total accrued expenses and other current liabilities $ 154,472 $ 118,689
NOTE 12:- LEASES
The main operating lease expenses include leases of office locations, data centers and vehicles. The lease terms of the Company’s operating leases generally range from 2 years to 11 years, with various expiration dates through 2033.
The following table presents supplemental information related to the operating leases:
December 31,
2024 2023
Weighted average remaining operating lease term in years 3.6 4.3
Weighted average discount rate of operating leases 5.52 % 5.45 %
The Company lease agreements generally do not contain any material residual value guarantees or material restrictive covenants.
The components of lease expense related to leases for the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, were as follows:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Components of lease expense:
Operating lease cost $ 23,499 $ 20,286 $ 18,218
Short-term lease cost and variable lease cost 1,190 2,462 1,735
Sublease income - (167) (447)
Maturities of lease liabilities as of December 31, 2024, were as follows:
Year Ending December 31, Amount
2025 $ 24,069
2026 19,609
2027 12,593
2028 6,679
2029 3,736
Thereafter 5,428
Total undiscounted lease payments $ 72,114
Less: imputed interest (7,672)
Present value of lease liabilities $ 64,442
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
NOTES TO THE CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
NOTE 13:- FINANCING ARRANGEMENTS
Long-term loan
Concurrently with the closing of the Connexity Acquisition, on September 1, 2021, the Company entered into a $300,000 senior secured term loan credit agreement (the “Credit Agreement”), among the Company, Taboola Inc., a wholly-owned Company’s subsidiary (the “Borrower”), the lenders party thereto and JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., as administrative agent. The Credit Agreement provides for borrowings in an aggregate principal amount of up to $300,000 (the “Facility”).
The Facility was fully drawn at closing, net of issuance expenses of $11,250, and the proceeds were used by the Company to finance a portion of the Connexity Acquisition.
The Facility is subject to customary borrowing conditions. The Credit Agreement was amended on June 12, 2023, to replace LIBOR with SOFR and accordingly the Facility bears interest at a variable annual rate based on Term SOFR or Base Rate plus a fixed margin. The Facility will mature on the seventh anniversary of the closing date. and amortizes at a rate of 1.00% per annum payable in equal quarterly installments, with the remaining principal amount due at maturity.
The Facility is mandatorily prepayable with a portion of the net cash proceeds of certain dispositions of assets, a portion of Taboola’s excess cash flow and the proceeds of incurrences of indebtedness not permitted under the Credit Agreement.
The Credit Agreement also contains customary representations, covenants and events of default. Failure to meet the covenants beyond applicable grace periods could result in acceleration of outstanding borrowings and/or termination of the Facility. As of December 31, 2024, the Company was in compliance with the Facility covenants.
In the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023 the Company voluntarily prepaid the principal amount of the outstanding debt under the Credit Agreement of $30,000 and $79,250, respectively.
As of December 31, 2024, the total future principal payments related to Facility are $122,735 and are due at final maturity on September 1, 2028.
The Facility is guaranteed by the Company and all of its wholly-owned material subsidiaries, subject to certain exceptions set forth in the Credit Agreement (collectively, the “Guarantors”). The obligations of the Borrower and the Guarantors are secured by substantially all the assets of the Borrower and the Guarantors including stock of subsidiaries, subject to certain exceptions set forth in the Credit Agreement.
The total interest expenses, including issuance costs amortization, recognized in connection with the long-term loan, $15,549 and $19,885, for the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively. The long-term loan interest and issuance costs amortization, included as interest expenses, are recognized through the remaining term of the Credit Agreement using the effective interest rate.
Revolving Credit Agreement
On August 9, 2022, the Company amended its Credit Agreement to provide for a five-year senior secured revolving credit facility (the “Revolving Credit Agreement”), among the Company, Taboola Inc., a wholly-owned Company’s subsidiary (the “Borrower”), and the lenders party thereto, with Citibank N.A., as lead arranger and JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., as administrative agent. The Revolving Credit Agreement provides for revolving loans in an aggregate committed principal amount of up to $90,000 (the “Revolving Loans”).
Certain representations, events of default and covenants of the Revolving Credit Agreement are substantially the same as those in the Credit Agreement. However, the Revolving Credit Agreement contains a financial covenant requiring the Company to maintain a Total Net Leverage Ratio (as defined in the Credit Agreement) as at the last day of each fiscal quarter. Borrowings under the Revolving Credit Agreement are subject to customary conditions and will bear interest at a variable annual rate based on Term SOFR or Base Rate plus a fixed margin. The lenders under the Credit Agreement and the lenders under the Revolving Credit Agreement are secured by the same collateral, including substantially all the assets of the Borrower and the Guarantors (as defined in the Credit Agreement) including shares of subsidiaries, subject to certain exceptions in the governing documents.
The proceeds of any Revolving Loans may be used for the working capital, capital expenditures and other general corporate purposes of Taboola and its subsidiaries and may also be used for Restricted Payments, Investments (including permitted acquisitions) and Restricted Debt Payments (each, as defined in the Credit Agreement) to the extent permitted under the Credit Agreement.
As of December 31, 2024, the Company was in compliance with the financial covenants and had no outstanding borrowings under the Revolving Credit Agreement.
As of December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, deferred financing costs associated with entering into the Revolving Credit Agreement in the total amount of $722, $893 and $1,147, respectively, were included in short-term and long-term prepaid expenses in the Company’s consolidated balance sheet.
The deferred financing costs are amortized on a straight-line basis over the term of the Revolving Credit Agreement. For the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, deferred financing costs amortization amounted to $378, $254 and $98, respectively.
NOTE 14:- SHAREHOLDERS’ EQUITY AND SHARE INCENTIVE PLANS
Share capital
Holders of Ordinary shares have the right to receive notice of, and to participate in, all general meetings of the Company, where each Ordinary share shall have one vote. Each holder has the right to receive dividends, if any, in proportion to their respective Ordinary share holdings. In the event of Taboola’s liquidation, after satisfaction of liabilities to creditors, Company assets will be distributed to the holders of its Ordinary shares in proportion to their shareholdings.
On December 30, 2022, in connection with the Yahoo transaction, the Company’s shareholders approved an amendment and restatement to the Articles to include a Non-voting Ordinary share class with an authorized share capital of 46,000,000. In January 2023 the Company issued 45,198,702 Non-voting Ordinary shares to Yahoo. The Non-voting Ordinary shares are not entitled to vote, except in limited circumstances as provided in the Articles. Other than the voting rights, the rights to receive notice of meetings of shareholders and limited circumstances as described in the Company’s Articles, the Non-voting Ordinary shares will have rights identical to the rights of Ordinary shares as described above (see Note 1b).
Share Buyback Program
The Company’s board of directors authorized a share buyback program for the repurchase of the Company’s outstanding Shares, which commenced in June 2023 and does not have an expiration date (the “Buyback Program”). In May and November 2023, the Company’s board of directors authorized up to a total of $80,000 of buybacks under the Buyback Program. In February 2024, the Company’s board of directors authorized up to $100,000 for use under the Buyback Program, including any remaining authority from the November 2023 board of directors' authorization. As permitted by the Buyback Program, share repurchases may be made from time to time, in privately negotiated transactions or in the open market, including through trading plans, at the discretion of the Company’s management and as permitted by securities laws and other legal requirements. The Buyback Program does not obligate the Company to repurchase any specific number of shares, and the number of shares repurchased may depend upon market and economic conditions and other factors. The Buyback Program may be discontinued, modified or suspended at any time.
During the year ended December 31, 2024, the Company repurchased 18,287,890 Shares, consisting of 17,299,594 Ordinary shares and 988,296 Non-voting Ordinary shares (see Note 18) at an average price of $4.06 per share (excluding broker and transaction fees of $367). As of December 31, 2024, the Company had remaining authorization to repurchase up to an aggregate amount of $45,562, subject to satisfying required conditions under the Isreali Companies Law and Companies Regulations.
In February 2025 the Company's board of directors authorized up to an additional $200,000 for use under the Buyback Program, subject to satisfying required conditions under the Israeli Companies Law and the Companies Regulations (Reliefs for Corporations, Whose Securities Are Listed on Foreign Stock Exchanges) - 2000.
Share Incentive Plans
a.During the years 2007, 2016, 2017 and 2020, the Company adopted several share incentive plans (together, the “Legacy Plans”) to provide incentives to the Company’s employees, directors, consultants and/or contractors. In June 2021 the Company adopted (i) the 2021 Share Incentive Plan (the “2021 Plan”, and together with the Legacy Plans, the “Plans”) and (ii) the Employee Stock Purchase Plan (the “ESPP”). Following the effectiveness of the 2021 Plan, the Company ceased making awards under the Legacy Plans, although previously granted awards under the Legacy Plans remain outstanding.
Under the Plans, the Company’s employees, directors, consultants and/or contractors are or were eligible to be granted equity-related awards, including options to acquire the Company’s Ordinary shares, restricted share units (“RSUs”) and restricted shares.
The equity related awards generally vest over 4 years and expire 10 years after the date of grant. Most of the RSUs granted prior to June 30, 2021, were subject to a two-tiered vesting arrangement, including a time-based vesting component which is generally over 4 years, and an additional vesting condition of a Merger/Sale or IPO being consummated within 5 years of the grant. RSUs granted under 2021 Plan, following the Company becoming publicly traded, are subject to a time-based vesting condition and in general vest over 4 years of the grant.
As of December 31, 2024, the maximum number of the Company’s Ordinary shares available for issuance under the 2021 Plan is equal to the sum of (i) 31,932,902 Ordinary shares, (ii) any shares subject to awards under the Legacy Plans which have expired, or were canceled, terminated, forfeited or settled in cash in lieu of issuance of shares or become unexercisable without having been exercised, and (iii) an annual increase on the first day of each year beginning in 2022 and on January 1 of each calendar year thereafter during the term of the 2021 Plan, equal to the lesser of (A) 5% of the outstanding shares on the last day of the immediately preceding calendar year and (B) such amount as determined by the Company’s board of directors if so determined prior to January 1 of a calendar year.
As of December 31, 2024, the maximum number of the Company’s Ordinary shares available for issuance under the ESPP shall not exceed in the aggregate 6,386,580 Ordinary shares. The ESPP share pool will be increased on the first day of each fiscal year during the term of the ESPP in an amount equal to the lesser of (i) 6,386,580 the Company’s ordinary shares, (ii) 2% of the total number of shares of the Ordinary shares outstanding (on a fully diluted basis) on the last day of the immediately preceding fiscal year, and (iii) such amount as determined by the Company’s board of directors if so determined prior to January 1 of a calendar year. As of December 31, 2024, the ESPP has not been activated and no Ordinary shares had been issued under the ESPP, therefore in the last two years the Company’s board of directors decided to disable the automatic enlargement feature included in the ESPP, as described above.
b.In addition to the Buyback Program detailed above, the Company utilizes a net issuance mechanism to satisfy tax withholding obligations related to equity-based compensation on behalf of its directors, officers and other employees (the “Net Issuances”). In April 2024, the Company satisfied the required conditions, as set forth in the Israeli Companies Law and the Companies Regulations, to conduct future repurchases of its Ordinary shares under the Buyback Program and Net Issuances in an aggregate amount up to $100,000, which amount was partly utilized under the Company’s previous Israeli court authorization. The Company’s board of directors have the authority to determine the amount to be utilized for Net Issuances and Ordinary share repurchases.
For the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, the Company utilized the net issuance mechanism in connection with equity-based compensation for certain executive officers, which resulted in a tax withholding payment by the Company of $3,086, $3,804 and $5,751, respectively, which were recorded as a reduction of additional paid-in capital.
c.The following is a summary of share option activity and related information for the year ended December 31, 2024 (including employees, directors, officers and consultants of the Company):
Outstanding Share Options Weighted Average Exercise Price Weighted Average Remaining Contractual Life (Years) Aggregate Intrinsic Value
Balance as of December 31, 2023 29,291,285 $ 3.35 5.27 $ 57,118
Exercised (3,551,720) 2.15 $ 6,630
Forfeited (582,434) 4.35
Balance as of December 31, 2024 25,157,131 $ 3.50 4.74 $ 36,594
Exercisable as of December 31, 2024 23,047,530 $ 3.23 4.59 $ 34,949
During the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, the Company did not grant options (see Note 2).
The aggregate intrinsic value in the table above represents the total intrinsic value that would have been received by the option holders had all option holders exercised their options on the last date of the period.
The weighted-average grant date fair value of options granted during the year ended December 31,2022, was $3.07.
The total intrinsic value of options exercised during the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, was $6,630, $11,866 and $26,473, respectively.
As of December 31, 2024, unrecognized share-based compensation cost related to unvested share options was $13,614, which is expected to be recognized over a weighted-average period of 1.45 years.
d.The following is a summary of the RSU activity and related information for the year ended December 31, 2024
:
Outstanding Restricted Shares Units Weighted Average Grant Date Fair Value
Balance as of December 31, 2023 23,479,308 $ 0.01
Granted 14,252,783 4.60
Vested (1) (10,049,326) 5.33
Forfeited (2,242,154) 4.75
Balance as of December 31, 2024 25,440,611 $ -
(1)A portion of the shares that vested were netted out to satisfy the tax obligations of the recipients. During the year ended December 31, 2024, a total of 810,179 RSUs were canceled to satisfy tax obligations, resulting in net issuance of 810,184 Ordinary shares.
The total release date fair value of RSUs was $36,221, for the year ended December 31, 2024.
The weighted-average grant date fair value of RSUs granted during the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, was $4.60, $3.54 and $5.47, respectively.
As of December 31, 2024, unrecognized share-based compensation cost related to unvested RSUs was $98,807, which is expected to be recognized over a weighted-average period of 2.5 years.
The total share-based compensation expense related to all of the Company’s share-based awards recognized for the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, were comprised as follows:
Year ended December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Cost of revenues $ 3,853 $ 3,924 $ 3,092
Research and development 26,149 24,471 26,433
Sales and marketing 17,846 16,397 22,615
General and administrative 19,250 19,539 22,781
Total share-based compensation expense $ 67,098 $ 64,331 $ 74,921
NOTE 15:- EMPLOYEES CONTRIBUTION PLAN
a.Pursuant to Israel’s Severance Pay Law, Israeli employees are entitled to severance pay equal to one month’s salary for each year of employment, or a portion thereof. The employees of the Israeli subsidiary elected to be included under section 14 of the Severance Pay Law, 1963 (“section 14”). According to this section, these employees are entitled only to monthly deposits, at a rate of 8.33% of their monthly salary, made in their name with insurance companies. Payments in accordance with section 14 release the Company from any future severance payments (under the above Israeli Severance Pay Law) in respect of those employees; therefore, related assets and liabilities are not presented in the balance sheet. For the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, the Company recorded $6,679, $5,989 and $6,638 respectively, in severance expenses related to these employees.
b.The Company offers a 401(k) Savings plan in the U.S. that qualifies as a deferred salary arrangement under Section 401(k) of the Internal Revenue Code (the “401(k) Plan”). Under the 401(k) Plan, participating employees can contribute up to 100% of their eligible compensation, subject to certain limitations. The 401(k) Plan provides for a discretionary employer matching contribution. The Company matches 50% of participating employee contributions to the plan up to 6% of the employee’s eligible compensation. For the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, the Company recorded $2,083, $1,769 and $1,766, respectively, of expenses related to the 401(k) plan.
NOTE 16:- INCOME TAXES
Tax rates
Ordinary taxable income in Israel is subject to a corporate tax rate of 23%. However, the effective tax rate payable by a company that derives income from a Preferred Technological Enterprise (as discussed below) may be considerably lower. Non-Israeli subsidiaries are taxed according to the tax laws in their jurisdictions.
Tax benefits applicable to the Company
The Law for the Encouragement of Industry (Taxes), 1969:
The Law for the Encouragement of Industry (Taxes), 1969 (the “Encouragement of Industry Law”), provides several tax benefits for “Industrial Companies”. Pursuant to the Encouragement of Industry Law, a company qualifies as an Industrial Company if it is a resident of Israel, the enterprise should be located in Israel and at least 90% of its income in any tax year (exclusive of income from government loans, capital gains, interest and dividends) is generated from an “Industrial Enterprise” that it owns. An Industrial Enterprise is defined as an enterprise whose principal activity, in a given tax year, is industrial activity.
An Industrial Company is entitled to certain tax benefits, including: (i) a deduction of the cost of purchases of patents, know-how and certain other intangible property rights (other than goodwill) used for the development or promotion of the Industrial Enterprise in equal amounts over a period of eight years, beginning from the year in which such rights were first used, (ii) the right to elect to file consolidated tax returns, under certain conditions, with additional Israeli Industrial Companies controlled by it, and (iii) the right to deduct expenses related to public offerings in equal amounts over a period of three years beginning from the year of the offering.
Eligibility for benefits under the Encouragement of Industry Law is not contingent upon the approval of any governmental authority. The Company believes that it currently qualifies as an industrial company within the definition of the Encouragement of Industry Law.
Tax benefits under the Law for the Encouragement of Capital Investments, 1959:
Pursuant to the Israeli Law for Encouragement of Capital Investments, 1959 (the “Investments Law”) and its various amendments, the Company has been granted a “Beneficiary Enterprise” status. The Company has utilized a tax exemption status for the years 2018 and 2019.
The benefits available to a Beneficiary Enterprise in Israel relate only to taxable income attributable to the specific investment program and are conditioned upon terms stipulated in the Investments Law. If the Company does not fulfill these conditions, in whole or in part, the benefits can be revoked, and the Company may be required to refund the benefits, in an amount linked to the Israeli consumer price index plus interest.
Tax exempt earnings are subject to claw back of the corporate tax return when they are distributed as dividend.
On November 15, 2021, the Investments Law was amended in order, inter alia, to encourage companies to voluntarily elect for an immediate payment of corporate tax on previously tax-exempted earnings which were earned pursuant to Approved and Privileged Enterprises (the “Amendment”). The Amendment provides a reduced corporate tax payment on Exempt Earnings accumulated until December 30, 2020, that were not yet distributed as a dividend, all subject to certain qualifying terms and conditions.
The Company had $54,784 in tax-exempt earnings attributable to the Privileged Enterprise programs. The Company elected to utilize the Amendment in December 2021 and paid the reduced corporate income tax in the amount of approximately $4,355. As a result of the election, as of December 31, 2021 the Company released all of its previously tax-exempt earnings and they are no longer subject to claw back of corporate taxes upon future dividend distribution.
The Technological Enterprise Incentives Regime (Amendment 73 to the Investments Law):
The Company applies various benefits allotted to it under the revised Investments Law as per Amendment 73 to the Investments Law regimes through regulations that have come into effect from January 1, 2017. Applicable benefits under the new regime include:
•Introduction of a benefit regime for “Preferred Technology Enterprises” (“PTE”), granting a 12% tax rate in central Israel on income deriving from benefited intangible assets, subject to a number of conditions being fulfilled, including a minimal amount or ratio of annual research and development expenditure and research and development employees, as well as having at least 25% of annual income derived from exports to large markets. PTE is defined as an enterprise which meets the aforementioned conditions and for which total consolidated revenues of its parent company and all subsidiaries are less than NIS 10 billion.
A “Special Preferred Technological Enterprise” (“SPTE”) from which total consolidated revenues of the Group of which the Company is a member exceeds NIS 10 billion in the tax year will be subject to tax at a rate of 6% on preferred income from the enterprise, regardless of the enterprise’s geographical location.
•A 12% capital gains tax rate on the sale of a preferred intangible asset to a foreign affiliated enterprise, provided that the asset was initially purchased from a foreign resident at an amount of NIS 200 million or more.
•A withholding tax rate of 20% for dividends paid from PTE income (with an exemption from such withholding tax applying to dividends paid to an Israeli company) may be reduced to 4% on dividends paid to a foreign resident company, subject to certain conditions regarding percentage of foreign ownership of the distributing entity.
The Company is eligible for PTE status which is implemented commencing 2021 and believes it is eligible for its tax benefits.
In 2023, the Company received a Tax Ruling from the Israeli Tax Authority that its activity is an industrial activity and is eligible for the status of a PTE, provided that the Company meets the requirements under the tax ruling. As of December 31, 2024, management believes that the Company meets the aforementioned conditions.
U.S. Tax
On December 22, 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (P.L. 115-97) (“TCJA”) was enacted, making significant changes to the U.S. tax law. Changes include, but are not limited to, a corporate income tax rate decrease from 35% to 21%, effective for tax years beginning January 1, 2018 and the transition of U.S. international taxation from a worldwide tax system to a modified territorial system, with a one-time mandatory transition tax on U.S. shareholder’s share of post-1986 earnings of all foreign corporations in which it owns at least 10% and created new taxes on certain foreign-sourced earnings and certain related-party payments - the Global Intangible Low Taxed Income (“GILTI”). Furthermore, changes introduced by the Tax Act to Section 174 of the Internal Revenue Code, that came into effect on January 1, 2022, require taxpayers to amortize research and development expenditures over five years (if expensed by a U.S. entity) or fifteen years (if expensed by non-U.S. entities), thereby increasing taxable income and payable tax.
In addition to lowering the statutory corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%, and among other U.S. international tax provisions, the TCJA introduced the Base Erosion Anti-abuse Tax (“BEAT”) which applies a minimum tax on multinational corporations by requiring companies subject to the BEAT to pay the greater of their regular tax liability (less certain credits, including foreign tax credits) or 10% for taxable years beginning in 2019 (12.5% after 2026) of a modified tax base which adds back certain related party payments. The BEAT comparison to the standard corporate income tax must be done each year if the taxpayer’s “base erosion” related party payments exceed 3% of total deductions on its U.S. tax return (“base erosion percentage” is generally the aggregate amount of base erosion tax benefits divided by aggregate amount of all allowable deductions).
The BEAT applies to “applicable taxpayers” making “base erosion payments” (deductible payments) to foreign related parties. “Applicable taxpayers” are U.S. corporations with average annual gross receipts for the 3-taxable-year period ending with the preceding taxable year are at least $500,000. Taboola Inc. is an “applicable taxpayer” for BEAT purposes in 2024.
Pillar two
In December 2021, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion Profit Shifting released Model Global Anti-Base Erosion rules (“Model Rules”) under Pillar Two. The Model Rules set forth the “common approach” for a global minimum tax rate at 15% for multinational enterprises with a turnover of more than Euros 750 million. Rules under Pillar Two were effective from January 1, 2024.
The Company assessed the impact of adopting Pillar Two rules on its consolidated financial statements. In certain jurisdictions, information required for the assessment is still being gathered and, therefore, the assessment is not complete. Based on the transitional country by country reporting (“CbCR”) safe harbor tests carried out so far, Taboola Group has identified potential impact to Pillar Two top-up taxes on profits earned in certain jurisdictions. The potential impact comes from the constituent entities in these jurisdictions where according to the transitional CbCR safe harbor tests, the simplified effective tax rate is below 15%.
a.The components of the income (loss) before taxes were as follows:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Israel $ 7,200 $ (65,764) $ (24,819)
Foreign 6,737 (10,777) 20,367
Total $ 13,937 $ (76,541) $ (4,452)
b. Taxes on income (tax benefit) are comprised as follows:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Current :
Israel $ 1,001 $ 1,363 $ 15
Foreign 26,014 19,632 23,332
Total current income tax expense 27,015 20,995 23,347
Deferred:
Israel - - 1,388
Foreign (9,318) (15,496) (17,212)
Total deferred income tax (benefit) expense (9,318) (15,496) (15,824)
Total tax on income (tax benefit) $ 17,697 $ 5,499 $ 7,523
A reconciliation of the Company’s theoretical income tax expense to actual income tax expense is as follows:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Income (loss) before taxes on income, as reported in the consolidated statements of income (loss) $ 13,937 $ (76,541) $ (4,452)
Statutory tax rate in Israel 23 % 23 % 23 %
Preferred Technology Enterprise benefits (6) % (9) % (61) %
Permanent difference - nondeductible expenses 50 % (9) % 86 %
Change in valuation allowance 10 % (11) % (109) %
Income taxes at a rate other than the Israel statutory tax rate 26 % (2) % (164) %
Prior years taxes 5 % 2 % 35 %
Uncertain tax position 15 % (6) % (10) %
Other 4 % 5 % 31 %
Effective tax rate 127 % (7) % (169) %
Deferred tax assets and liabilities:
Deferred taxes reflect the net tax effects of temporary differences between the carrying amounts of assets and liabilities for financial reporting purposes and the amounts used for income tax purposes. As of December 31, 2024, and 2023 , the deferred tax assets and liabilities presented in the balance sheet are comprised as follow:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023
Deferred tax liabilities $ (5,497) $ (14,815)
As of December 31, 2024, and 2023 the Company’s deferred taxes were in respect of the following:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023
Carry forward tax losses $ 3,196 $ 8,227
Research and development 3,410 3,111
Operating lease liability 13,064 14,225
Reserves and Allowances 5,938 6,146
Share-based compensation expenses 11,787 10,408
Tax credit carry forward 10,094 9,657
Issuance and Transaction expenses 335 533
Intangibles assets, net 1,358 1,643
Interest expense carried forward 2,423 2,735
Other 534 347
Deferred tax assets before valuation allowance 52,139 57,032
Valuation allowance (26,179) (24,781)
Deferred tax asset 25,960 32,251
Intangibles assets, net (16,772) (31,208)
Property and equipment, net (1,617) (2,031)
Capitalized research and development (1,374) (966)
Operating lease right-of-use assets (11,682) (12,368)
Other (12) (493)
Deferred tax liabilities (31,457) (47,066)
Deferred tax liabilities, net $ (5,497) $ (14,815)
A valuation allowance is provided when it is more likely than not that the deferred tax assets will not be realized. The Company has established a valuation allowance to offset certain deferred tax assets on December 31, 2024 and 2023 , due to the uncertainty of realizing future tax benefits from its net operating loss carryforwards and other deferred tax assets.
As of December 31, 2024, the Company has an accumulated tax loss carry-forward of approximately $23,805 in Israel, which does not have an expiration date, and $1,463 federal tax in the U.S. which can be offset in accordance with the limitation as described in Section 382 of the code due to U.S. subsidiary’s prior “change in ownership”. The annual limitation may result in the expiration of net operating losses before utilization.
As of December 31, 2024, $171,446 of undistributed earnings held by the Company’s foreign subsidiaries are designated as indefinitely reinvested. If these earnings were repatriated to Israel, they would be subject to income taxes and to an adjustment for foreign tax credits and foreign withholding taxes in the amount of $13,996. The Company did not recognize deferred taxes liabilities on undistributed earnings of its foreign subsidiaries, as the Company intends to indefinitely reinvest those earnings.
A reconciliation of the beginning and ending balance of total unrecognized tax positions is as follows:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023
Unrecognized tax position, beginning of year $ 8,216 $ 3,537
Increases related to current years’ tax positions 1,712 1,727
Increase related to prior years' tax positions (1) 544 3,382
Decreases due to lapses of statutes of limitations (181) (430)
Unrecognized tax position, end of year $ 10,291 $ 8,216
(1) The 2023 prior year’s tax positions includes $2,684 from prior year tax provision.
As of December 31, 2024, the total amount of gross uncertain tax benefits was $10,291, out of which an amount of $10,199, if recognized, would affect the Company’s effective tax rate. The Company operates in multiple jurisdictions throughout the world, and its tax returns are periodically audited or subject to review by both domestic and foreign authorities. The Company currently does not expect uncertain tax positions to change significantly over the next 12 months, except in the case of settlements with tax authorities, the likelihood and timing of which is difficult to estimate.
As of December 31, 2024 and 2023, unrecognized tax benefit in the amount of $92 and $87, was presented net of deferred tax assets.
Tax assessments:
The Company has final tax assessments in Israel through 2018, in the UK through 2019, and in the US through 2020.
NOTE 17:- COMMITMENTS AND CONTINGENCIES
Commercial Commitments
In the ordinary course of the business, the Company enters into agreements with certain digital properties, under which, in some cases it agrees to pay them a guaranteed amount, generally per thousand page views on a monthly basis. These agreements could cause a gross loss on digital property accounts in which the guarantee is higher than the actual revenue generated. These contracts generally range in duration from 2 to 5 years, though some can be shorter or longer.
Non-cancelable Purchase Obligations
In the normal course of business, the Company enters into non-cancelable purchase commitments with various parties to purchase primarily software and IT related-based services. As of December 31, 2024, the Company had outstanding non-cancelable purchase obligations in the amount of $47,472.
Legal Proceedings
In the ordinary course of business, the Company may be subject from time to time to various proceedings, lawsuits, disputes, or claims. The Company investigates these claims as they arise and record a provision, as necessary. Provisions are reviewed and adjusted to reflect the impact of negotiations, estimated settlements, legal rulings, advice of legal counsel and other information and events pertaining to a particular matter. Although claims are inherently unpredictable, the Company is currently not aware of any matters that, it believes would individually, or in the aggregate, have a material adverse effect on its business, financial position, results of operations, or cash flows.
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
NOTES TO THE CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
NOTE 18:- RELATED PARTY TRANSACTIONS
The Company is a party to certain transaction-related agreements with Yahoo, pursuant to which the Company issued 39,525,691 Ordinary shares and 45,198,702 Non-voting Ordinary shares to Yahoo, and granting Yahoo the right to appoint one representative to the Company’s board of directors, resulting in Yahoo to become a principal shareholder effective the Transaction closing on January 17, 2023 (see Note 1b).
In June 2024, the Company repurchased 988,296 of the Non-voting Ordinary shares at a price of $4.07 per share, based on the terms stipulated in the agreement, for an aggregate purchase price of $4,022, as part of the Buyback Program (see Note 14).
The Company and its affiliates are parties to several agreements in the ordinary course of business with Yahoo and its affiliates. Revenues from the related party are derived from Yahoo’s advertiser spend on the Company’s network, for which Yahoo is the billing entity. Traffic acquisition cost to the related party is compensation for placing Taboola’s platform on Yahoo’s digital property. In connection with these agreements, for the year ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, the Company recorded revenues from Yahoo in the amount of $233,640, which represented approximately 13% of the Company’s total revenue, and $40,902, respectively. In addition, the Company recorded traffic acquisition costs related to Yahoo for the year ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, in the amount of $275,539 and $45,183, respectively. Certain traffic acquisition costs for the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, noted herein, are unaffiliated with the Yahoo revenues recorded for this period.
As of December 31, 2024 and 2023, in regards to Yahoo, the Company’s balances of trade receivables were $76,677 which represented approximately 21% of the Company’s trade receivables and $12,297, and its balances of trade payables were $68,556 and $38,657, respectively, associated with the revenues presented on a gross and net basis.
The Company and Yahoo, pursuant to the Omnibus Agreement entered into on November 28, 2022, each agreed to pay certain expenses in connection with the transaction and each party agreed to reimburse the other for some or all of these expenses. Under these arrangements, the Company recognized expenses, net of $1,441 and $3,650, for the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively.
On February 24, 2025, the Company and Yahoo entered into a Share Repurchase Agreement (“Repurchase Agreement”). In accordance with the Repurchase Agreement, the Company may conduct weekly repurchases of Yahoo's Non-voting Ordinary shares at a purchase price determined by a market based pricing formula as specified in the Repurchase Agreement. The maximum amount of Non-voting Ordinary shares that may be repurchased each week will be 25% of the applicable allowable limit under Rule 10b-18 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The Repurchase Agreement terminates upon the earlier of: (i) the Company obtaining regulatory approval permitting Yahoo’s equity ownership in the Company to exceed 25%; (ii) the Company determining, as specified in the Repurchase Agreement, that no such approval is required; or (ii) December 31, 2025.
NOTE 19:- SEGMENTS AND GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
The following table represents total revenue by geographic area based on the Advertisers’ billing address:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Israel $ 108,213 $ 144,048 $ 189,956
United States 837,918 564,603 519,463
United Kingdom 72,546 78,080 72,697
Germany 144,546 132,041 123,485
Rest of the World 602,998 520,913 495,549
Total $ 1,766,220 $ 1,439,685 $ 1,401,150
The following table represents the Company’s long-lived assets (1), net by geographic area:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023
Israel $ 67,867 $ 73,951
United States 39,390 44,921
United Kindom 5,024 6,290
Rest of the world 16,103 8,739
Total $ 128,385 $ 133,901
(1)Long-lived assets are comprised of property and equipment, net and operating lease right-of-use assets
The following table represents the Company’s definite long-lived intangible assets and goodwill, classified by the location of the controlling statutory company:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023
Israel $ 21,692 $ 22,066
United States $ 594,799 654,741
Rest of the world $ 4,507 4,382
Total $ 620,998 $ 681,189
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
NOTES TO THE CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
U.S. dollars in thousands, except share and per share data
NOTE 20:- NET LOSS PER SHARE ATTRIBUTABLE TO ORDINARY AND NON-VOTING ORDINARY SHAREHOLDERS
Year Ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
Ordinary Non-voting Ordinary Non-voting Ordinary shares Non-voting
shares Ordinary shares Ordinary Ordinary
shares shares shares
Numerator:
Net loss attributable to Ordinary shareholders, basic and diluted $ (3,271) $ (489) $ (71,833) $ (10,207) $ (11,975) $ -
Denominator:
Weighted-average shares used in computing net loss per share attributable to Ordinary shareholders, basic and diluted 298,769,457 44,619,451 303,282,558 43,093,556 254,284,781 -
Net loss per share attributable to Ordinary and Non-voting Ordinary shareholders, basic and diluted $ (0.01) $ (0.01) $ (0.24) $ (0.24) $ (0.05) $ -
The potential number of Ordinary shares that were excluded from the computation of diluted net loss per share attributable to Ordinary shareholders for the periods presented because including them would have been anti-dilutive is as follows:
Year ended
December 31,
2024 2023 2022
RSUs 20,209,991 25,554,224 18,063,802
Outstanding share options 11,812,628 27,397,556 30,284,408
Warrants 12,349,990 12,349,990 12,349,990
Issuable Ordinary shares related to business combination under holdback arrangement 484,500 1,647,292 2,380,736
Total 44,857,109 66,949,062 63,078,936
TABOOLA.COM LTD.

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ITEM 9. CHANGES IN AND DISAGREEMENTS WITH ACCOUNTANTS
ITEM 9: CHANGES IN AND DISAGREEMENTS WITH ACCOUNTANTS
None.

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ITEM 9A. CONTROLS AND PROCEDURES
ITEM 9A:CONTROLS AND PROCEDURES
Evaluation of Disclosure Controls and Procedures
We maintain disclosure controls and procedures (as that term is defined in Rules 13a-15(e) and 15d-15(e) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended) that are designed to ensure that information required to be disclosed in the Company’s reports under the Exchange Act is recorded, processed, summarized and reported within the time periods specified in the SEC’s rules and forms and that such information is accumulated and communicated to our management, including our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, as appropriate, to allow timely decisions regarding required disclosures. Any controls and procedures, no matter how well designed and operated, can provide only reasonable assurance of achieving the desired control objectives. Our management, with the participation of our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, has evaluated the effectiveness of the design and operation of our disclosure controls and procedures as of December 31, 2024 Based upon that evaluation, our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer concluded that, as of December 31, 2024, our disclosure controls and procedures were effective to accomplish their objectives at the reasonable assurance level.
Management’s Annual Report on Internal Control over Financial Reporting
Our management is responsible for establishing and maintaining adequate internal control over financial reporting (as defined in Rules 13a-15(f) and 15d-15(f) under the Exchange Act). Our internal control over financial reporting is a process designed to provide reasonable assurance regarding the reliability of financial reporting and the preparation of financial statements for external purposes in accordance with U.S generally accepted accounting principles. Our internal control over financial reporting includes those policies and procedures that (i) pertain to the maintenance of records that, in reasonable detail, accurately and fairly reflect the transactions and dispositions of the assets of the Company; (ii) provide reasonable assurance that transactions are recorded as necessary to permit preparation of financial statements in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, and that receipts and expenditures of the Company are being made only in accordance with authorizations of management and directors of the Company; and (iii) provide reasonable assurance regarding prevention or timely detection of unauthorized acquisition, use, or disposition of the Company’s assets that could have a material effect on the financial statements.
Under the supervision and with the participation of our management, including our principal executive officers and principal financial officer, we conducted an evaluation of the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2024, based on the criteria set forth by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) in Internal Control-Integrated Framework (2013). Based on this evaluation, management concluded that our internal control over financial reporting was effective as of December 31, 2024.
The effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2024 has been audited by Kost Forer Gabbay & Kasierer, A Member of EY Global, an independent registered public accounting firm, as stated in their report which is included in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Changes in Internal Control over Financial Reporting
There were no changes in our internal controls over financial reporting (as such term is defined in Rules 13a-15(f) and 15d-15(f) under the Securities Exchange Act) that occurred during the quarter ended December 31, 2024 that have materially affected, or are reasonably likely to materially affect, our internal control over financial reporting.

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ITEM 9B. OTHER INFORMATION
ITEM 9B. OTHER INFORMATION
Rule 10b5-1 Trading Plans
Each of the following trading plans are intended to satisfy the affirmative defense conditions of Rule 10b5-1(c).
On November 25, 2024 Lior Golan, Chief Technology Officer, adopted a 10b5-1 trading plan providing for the potential sale of up to 1,017,498 Ordinary shares of the Company. The duration of the plan is until the earlier of September 30, 2025 or the completion of all transactions subject to the plan.
On November 26, 2024 the trustee on behalf of a family trust established by Eldad Maniv, President and Chief Operating Officer, adopted a 10b5-1 trading plan providing for the potential sale of up to 2,000,000 Ordinary shares of the Company. The duration of the plan is until the earlier of August 22, 2025 or the completion of all transactions subject to the plan.
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
Executive Officer Transition
As of February 25, 2025 Mr. Lior Golan no longer qualifies as an “executive officer” or “officer” as defined under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. This determination was a result of the Company’s and Mr. Golan’s mutual decision that he transition away from his substantial management responsibilities to focus on long-term strategic initiatives and select high impact products to drive the Company’s growth. Mr. Golan remains the Company’s Chief Technology Officer.
Entry into a Material Definitive Agreement
On February 24, 2025, the Company and Yahoo entered into a Share Repurchase Agreement (“Repurchase Agreement”). Yahoo is an affiliate of the Company and a related party due to their greater than 10% ownership of the Company’s Shares and their right to appoint a Board designee pursuant to the Omnibus Agreement entered into on November 28, 2022 between the Company and Yahoo. Under the Repurchase Agreement, the Company will conduct weekly repurchases of Yahoo's Non-voting Ordinary shares at a purchase price determined by a market-based pricing formula specified in the Repurchase Agreement. The maximum amount of Non-voting Ordinary shares repurchased each week will be 25% of the applicable allowable limit under Rule 10b-18 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The Repurchase Agreement terminates upon the earlier of: (i) the Company obtaining regulatory approval permitting Yahoo’s equity ownership in the Company to exceed 25%; (ii) the Company determining as specified in the Repurchase Agreement that no such approval is required; or (ii) December 31, 2025.

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ITEM 10. DIRECTORS, EXECUTIVE OFFICERS AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
ITEM 10. DIRECTORS, EXECUTIVE OFFICERS AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
We have adopted a Code of Conduct that applies to all our employees, officers and directors. Our Code of Conduct addresses, among other things, competition and fair dealing, gifts and entertainment, conflicts of interest, international business laws, financial matters and external reporting, company assets, confidentiality and corporate opportunity requirements and the process for reporting violations of the Code of Conduct.
We will disclose on our website any amendment to, or waiver from, a provision of our Code of Conduct that applies to our directors or executive officers to the extent required under the rules of the SEC or the Nasdaq. Our Code of Business Conduct is available on our website at https://investors.taboola.com/corporate-governance/governance-overview.
We have adopted insider trading policies and procedures governing the purchase, sale and certain other dispositions of our securities that applies to our directors, officers, employees and other covered persons. We believe that our insider trading policy is reasonably designed to promote compliance with insider trading laws, rules and regulations and listing standards applicable to us. In addition, with regard to the Company’s trading in its own securities, it is the Company’s policy to comply with the federal securities laws and a applicable exchange listing requirements. Our current insider trading policy is filed as Exhibit 19 to this Annual Report.
The remaining information required to be disclosed by this item is incorporated herein by reference to the 2025 Proxy Statement, which we expect to file with the SEC within 120 days after the end of our fiscal year ended December 31, 2024.

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ITEM 11. EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION
ITEM 11. EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION
The information required to be disclosed by this item is incorporated herein by reference to the 2025 Proxy Statement, which we expect to file with the SEC within 120 days after the end of our fiscal year ended December 31, 2024.

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ITEM 12. SECURITY OWNERSHIP OF CERTAIN BENEFICIAL OWNERS
ITEM 12. SECURITY OWNERSHIP OF CERTAIN BENEFICIAL OWNERS AND MANAGEMENT AND RELATED SHAREHOLDER MATTERS
The information required to be disclosed by this item is incorporated herein by reference to the 2025 Proxy Statement, which we expect to file with the SEC within 120 days after the end of our fiscal year ended December 31, 2024.

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ITEM 13. CERTAIN RELATIONSHIPS AND RELATED TRANSACTIONS
ITEM 13. CERTAIN RELATIONSHIPS AND RELATED TRANSACTIONS, AND DIRECTOR INDEPENDENCE
The information required to be disclosed by this item is incorporated herein by reference to the 2025 Proxy Statement, which we expect to file with the SEC within 120 days after the end of our fiscal year ended December 31, 2024.

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ITEM 14. PRINCIPAL ACCOUNTING FEES AND SERVICES
ITEM 14. PRINCIPAL ACCOUNTING FEES AND SERVICES
The information required to be disclosed by this item is incorporated herein by reference to the 2025 Proxy Statement, which we expect to file with the SEC within 120 days after the end of our fiscal year ended December 31, 2024.

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ITEM 15. EXHIBITS, FINANCIAL STATEMENT SCHEDULES
ITEM 15. EXHIBITS, FINANCIAL STATEMENT SCHEDULES
We have filed the following documents as part of this Form 10-K:
1.Consolidated Financial Statements:
Reports of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm (PCAOB ID: 1281)
Consolidated Balance Sheets
Consolidated Statements of Income (Loss)
Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Income (Loss)
Consolidated Statements of Convertible Preferred Shares and Shareholders’ Equity
Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows
Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements
2.All schedules have been omitted because they are not required, not applicable, not present in amounts sufficient to require submission of the schedule, or the required information is otherwise included.
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
3.Exhibits
TABOOLA.COM LTD.
Exhibit Index
Incorporated by Reference
Exhibit No. Exhibit Description Form File No. Exhibit Filing Date Filed /Furnished
Herewith
3.1 Articles of Association of Taboola.com Ltd. as Amended on December 30, 2022
8-K 001-40566 3.1 January 17, 2023
4.1 Description of Securities
*
4.2 Specimen Ordinary Share Certificate of Taboola.com Ltd.
333-255684 4.5 April 30, 2021
4.3 Specimen Warrant Certificate of Taboola.com Ltd.
333-255684 4.6 April 30, 2021
10.1†† Form of Director and Officer Indemnification Agreement
333-255684 10.10 April 30, 2021
10.2†† Compensation Policy for Officers and Directors
20-F 001-40566 4.5 March 24, 2022
10.3†† Compensation Package for the Board of Directors, amended as of May 28, 2024
10-Q 001-40566 10.1 February 28, 2024
10.4†† Form of 2021 Taboola.com Ltd. Share Incentive Plan
333-255684 10.8 April 30, 2021
10.5†† Form of Taboola.com Ltd. Employee Stock Purchase Plan
333-255684 10.9 April 30, 2021
10.6† Stock Purchase Agreement dated as of July 22, 2021, by and among Taboola Inc., Shop Management LLC, and for certain specified sections of the Purchase Agreement, Taboola.com Ltd.
/A 333-257879 2.3 September 1, 2021
10.7 Amended and Restated Investors’ Rights Agreement, dated as of January 25, 2021, by and among Taboola.com Ltd. and certain shareholders of Taboola.com Ltd.
333-255684 4.1 April 30, 2021
10.8 Registration Rights Agreement between Taboola.com Ltd. and Shop Management, LLC dated as of September 1, 2021
6-K 001-40566 99.2 September 1, 2021
10.9 Credit Agreement, dated as of September 1, 2021, by and among Taboola.com Ltd., Taboola, Inc., as borrower, the lenders party thereto and JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., as administrative agent.
6-K 001-40566 99.3 September 1, 2021
10.10† Incremental Facility Amendment No. 1, dated as of August 9, 2022, by and among Taboola.com Ltd., Taboola, Inc., as borrower, the lenders party thereto and JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., as administrative agent
6-K 001-40566 99.1 August 22, 2022
10.11† Amendment No. 2, dated as of June 12, 2023, to the Credit Agreement by and among Taboola.com Ltd., Taboola, Inc., as borrower, the lenders party thereto and JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., as administrative agent
10-Q 001-40566 10.2 August 9, 2023
10.12† Omnibus Agreement, dated as of November 28, 2022, by and among Taboola.com Ltd., College Top Holdings, Inc., and Yahoo AdTech JV, LLC
8-K 001-40566 10.1 January 17, 2023
10.13† Investor Rights Agreement, dated as of January 17, 2023 by and between Taboola.com Ltd. and College Top Holdings, Inc.
8-K 001-40566 10.2 January 17, 2023
10.14†† Employment Agreement, dated April 20, 2017, by and between Taboola, Inc. and Adam Singolda
10-K 001-40566 10.12 March 13, 2023
10.15†† Amendment to Compensation Package, dated June 1, 2023, by and between Taboola.com Ltd. and Adam Singolda
10-Q 001-40566 10.1 August 9, 2023
10.16#†† Employment Agreement, dated August 31, 2012, by and between Taboola.com Ltd. and Eldad Maniv
10-K 001-40566 10.14 March 13, 2023
10.17†† Amendment to Employment Agreement dated January 24, 2021 by and between Taboola.com Ltd. and Eldad Maniv
10-K 001-40566 10.15 March 13, 2023
10.18†† Amended and Restated Employment Agreement, dated January 1, 2011, by and between Taboola.com Ltd. and Lior Golan
10-K 001-40566 10.16 March 13, 2023
10.19†† Amended and Restated Offer Letter, dated March 3, 2023 by and between Taboola, Inc. and Stephen Walker
10-K 001-40566 10.17 March 13, 2023
10.20†† Offer Letter, dated September 4, 2019, by and between Taboola, Inc. and Kristy Sundjaja
10-K 001-40566 10.18 March 13, 2023
10.21†† Form of Restricted Share Unit Grant Agreement under Taboola.com Ltd.’s 2021 Share Incentive Plan
10-K 001-40566 10.1 February 28, 2024
10.22# Digital Property and Demand Services Agreement, dated as of November 28, 2022, and amendments through June 30, 2024, by and between Taboola, Inc. and Yahoo Inc. and its affiliates
10-Q 001-40566 10.1 November 7, 2024
19†
Insider Trading Policy and Procedures
*
21 Significant Subsidiaries of Taboola.com Ltd.
*
23 Consent of Kost Forer Gabbay & Kasierer, a member of EY Global, independent registered accounting firm for the Registrant.
*
31.1 Rule 13a-14(a)/15d-14(a) Certification of Chief Executive Officer
*
31.2 Rule 13a-14(a)/15d-14(a) Certification of Chief Financial Officer
*
32 Section 1350 Certifications
*
97 Policy for Recovery of Erroneously Awarded Compensation
10-K 001-40566 February 28, 2024
101.INS Inline XBRL Instance Document
101.SCH Inline XBRL Taxonomy Extension Schema Document
101.CAL Inline XBRL Taxonomy Extension Calculation Linkbase Document
101.DEF Inline XBRL Taxonomy Extension Definition Linkbase Document
101.LAB Inline XBRL Taxonomy Extension Label Linkbase Document
101.PRE Inline XBRL Taxonomy Extension Presentation Linkbase Document
104 Cover Page Interactive Data File (embedded with the Inline XBRL document)
* Filed herewith.
** Furnished herewith.
# Certain confidential portions (indicated by brackets and asterisks) have been omitted from this exhibit.
† Certain schedules and exhibits to this Exhibit omitted pursuant to Regulation S-K Item 601(b)(2). The Registrant agrees to furnish supplementally a copy of any omitted schedule or exhibit to the SEC upon request.
†† Indicates a management contract or compensatory plan.
Certain agreements filed as exhibits to this Annual Report contain representations and warranties that the parties thereto made to each other. These representations and warranties have been made solely for the benefit of the other parties to such agreements
and may have been qualified by certain information that has been disclosed to the other parties to such agreements and that may not be reflected in such agreements. In addition, these representations and warranties may be intended as a way of allocating risks among parties if the statements contained therein prove to be incorrect, rather than as actual statements of fact. Accordingly, there can be no reliance on any such representations and warranties as characterizations of the actual state of facts. Moreover, information concerning the subject matter of any such representations and warranties may have changed since the date of such agreements.
TABOOLA.COM LTD.