Taboola to go public at $2.6B valuation

https://www.axios.com/taboola-public-spac-28deba29-9e85-415e-a174-2a0c4dddb71f.html

by TechBro8615 • 5 years ago

97 163 5 years ago

stewx• 5 years ago

Nice guys finish last.

"Singolda tells Axios that he sees any sort of open web device, whether it being a smart refrigerator or a smart TV, one day being able to use Taboola's technology to power content recommendations."

Oh god no. If chumbox advertising gets integrated into IoT devices I'm getting a PiHole for my sanity.

"While Taboola relies mostly on artificial intelligence to power content recommendations, Singolda says the company has invested in hiring over 50 full-time human moderation to ensure that every piece of content on its site is approved."

I use uBlock Origin religiously, but from what I can tell most Taboola recommendations are the same 15 or so clickbait topics repeated ad infinitum. Woman mid shout, guy holding credit card, lotus fruit, some weird berry that's supposed to cure something, skin disorder, etc.

impendia• 5 years ago

It seems this is the natural endgame, every refrigerator will come with an LCD screen on the front that advertises at you.

I just hope that my new fridge will continue to keep my food cold after I smash the screen with a hammer.

thedrbrian• 5 years ago

Don’t do that. Use it as spare parts for a new project. When the screens do come out they’ll probably run some flavour of android so it might be flashable.

rtkwe• 5 years ago

I've just never connected my smart tv to the wifi to avoid that fate.

eecc• 5 years ago

Don’t, they’ll add some routine that makes you tap on some “agree” button and shut down the whole darn thing otherwise... I have an idea: under the perverse excuse of delivering firmware updates for your own network safety!!!

Hmm, the plot of Brazil becomes every day more realistic. Ah, what times were living!

umvi• 5 years ago

Well hopefully we can figure out ways to integrate advertising so deeply into every aspect of our lives that you can no longer escape marketing with pi holes and hammers. Imagine using a public urinal and you can watch an LCD screen while taking care of business. Filling up your car with gas? Fill your mind with ads while you do it! Imagine glasses that show augmented-reality ads based on your current location and what you are looking at, that would be incredible. Any place people rest their eyeballs should contain ads. Digital picture frames that show family photos in your home should occasionally flash ads, etc. Hopefully the National Park Service can install some satellite base stations so that hikers and campers can get the urgent advertising they need to be aware of the latest survival gear while out in nature. Basically, we need to prevent people from having quiet time and thinking - we need to come with as many ways as possible to aggressively interrupt and intrude thoughts with gentle reminders that the economy needs stimulating and that the only way to truly be happy is with more stuff.

dylan6042• 5 years ago

The hacker part of this website would investigate taking the LCD screen out, and repurposing it. We all know that DIY robot that goes to the fridge to bring you a snack will need some sort of LCD screen to act as an interface for you to choose the snack. It's not like we're going to use an iPad for that. We're too busy putting those in our cars.

jostmey• 5 years ago

It will make people like us look crazy! People will walk into our homes and see smashed and covered ad-screens

RankingMember• 5 years ago

My experience with modern refrigerators tells me that the fridge will likely _not_ continue to keep your food cold after the crappy display fails, whether by hammer or otherwise.

reaperducer3• 5 years ago

It seems this is the natural endgame, every refrigerator will come with an LCD screen on the front that advertises at you.

Child's crayon drawing + magnet = problem solved.

user22• 5 years ago

FYI: pihole does not block taboola ads because they are not served from a separate network that can be filtered.

You need to use a non-dns method of filtering them out

manigandham• 5 years ago

The vast majority of these ads are rendered by JS from a third-party domain so they can be filtered out easily with DNS.

hasperdi• 5 years ago

Oh yeah for sure you can block it using PiHole. Just add (^|\.)taboola\.com$ to your blacklist.

Bonus: add (^|\.)outbrain\.com$ too while you’re at it.

mortenjorck• 5 years ago

If chumbox advertising gets integrated into IoT devices I'm getting a PiHole for my sanity.

I tend to think of something like this as more of a “move to a cabin in the woods” scenario, but I suppose that could be a workable compromise.

In all seriousness, I’m morbidly curious as to how chumbox “technology” would apply to TV show and whatever kind of “content” recommendations would go on a smart fridge. Viscerally unsettling thumbnails that have tested for maximum conversion? Perfect for the kitchen!

alexjplant• 5 years ago

I thought it was an obscure regionalism for a refrigerator... that definition makes far more sense grammatically.

ChrisRR3• 5 years ago

Who the hell would want clickbait ads streamed to their fridge? This is awful idea

We're inching closer to the episode of Black Mirror where everyone is forced to stare at ads all day

m4tthumphrey• 5 years ago

One step closer to 15 million merits [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

asiachick• 5 years ago

Just don't buy IoT devices that have ads (or period)?

safog• 5 years ago

It'll eventually become the default. Every single new fridge will have a display. And that display will have ads.

ocdtrekkie4• 5 years ago

The ad industry is prepared for this. DNS-over-HTTPS will ignore your PiHole, and lovingly bring you ads anyways. While you can turn DoH off in your browser, your IoT device will not be so configurable. And will most likely fail to work entirely if you block access to Google's DoH endpoint.

DoH is an incredibly user hostile technology designed to remove your agency to control your network traffic, and by and large, the majority of tech enthusiasts have cheered for it.

ryandrake• 5 years ago

It'll be an arms race. DNS-based blackholes would give way to IP-by-IP firewall rules.

I remember when personal firewalls were mostly about blocking threats coming in through incoming connections. Now, I use mine more to block threats already on my network from exfiltrating through outgoing connections.

burnte2• 5 years ago

1. DoH is a user configurable setting, it cannot be dictated by ad vendors or websites.

2. DoH fails back to standard DNS.

3. DoH is hard to filter, just like other TLS encrypted traffic.

4. DoH is a user FRIENDLY technology meant to increase user privacy and reduce DNS hijacking.

5. Don't like it? Turn it off. Only you have that power to enable or disable it.

tomjen3• 5 years ago

DoH removes the agency of the network provider. This is great if you can't trust the network.

If I used my ISPs DNS resolver it wouldn't allow me to access sci-hub. I can trivially use Googles DNS, but if that where to change DoH would save me.

The other problem is solvable by not buying an IOT device with a screen. I can't buy a dumb TV, but I do okay with my current one and my computer monitor.

flyinghamster• 5 years ago

DoH is an incredibly user hostile technology designed to remove your agency to control your network traffic

I view it as more of a double-edged sword. It can be very handy if you have a hostile ISP playing shenanigans with DNS or logging your queries and selling the data, but as you point out, it's also useful for bad actors as well.

650REDHAIR• 5 years ago

I bought a Pi Zero W awhile back and it sat in my desk for like a year. While going through my desk about a month ago I decided to take 10 minutes to set it up and regret not doing it sooner! The little thing is pretty amazing. I've since moved the Pi Zero W to my travel bag paired with my travel modem and upgraded to a regular Pi at home!

perardi2• 5 years ago

The day my god-forsaken fridge presents me with a Taboola chumbox is the day I go full Amish and retire to a hut on my farmland in southern Illinois.

jyriand• 5 years ago

Are SPAC's some kind of new financial inventions? I see this term popping up quite frequently.

loganfrederick• 5 years ago

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2020/11/19/the-loom...

JumpCrisscross• 5 years ago

Are SPAC's some kind of new financial inventions?

Relatively recent, yes. Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) are a re-branding and evolution of the 1980s' blank cheque companies [1].

[1] https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

tylerrobinson• 5 years ago

A chumbox or chumbucket is a form of online advertising that uses a grid of thumbnails and captions to drive traffic to other sites and webpages. This form of advertising is often associated with low quality "clickbait" links and articles. The term derives from the fishing practice of "chumming", the use of fish meat as a lure for fish.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox

This word is used in the article and while I’m quite familiar with the thing, I didn’t know it had a name. Very fitting for the low-quality content that it contains!

estebarb• 5 years ago

For our own sanity I hope it gets shorted to zero...

youngtaff• 5 years ago

$2.6B worth of shite…

JohnJamesRambo• 5 years ago

If I had a top 5 list for who killed the internet I loved, this would be on it.

u678u• 5 years ago

I hate these ads as much as anyone else, but realistically these are one of the main competitors we're relying on to keep the web open and away from Google and Facebook right?

manuelabeledo• 5 years ago

While competition is good, do we really want this kind of competition?

Google ads became popular precisely because they were light and non invasive. These quite aggressively take a chunk of the screen real estate, and sometimes are very disruptive, e.g. when they put them between articles and comments.

555552• 5 years ago

No they became popular because they paid publishers better because they had more data for targeting.

ChrisRR3• 5 years ago

Do you want a giant douche or a turd sandwich?

ev1• 5 years ago

They are arguably worse, more violating than both of those, and exclusively serve malware or fraud/unwanted porn/gore.

At least I get actual brands on Google or Facebook, Taboola has absolutely nothing other than literal spam.

llacb47• 5 years ago

You won't believe what this adtech clickfarm was valued at! The results will shock you!

da_big_ghey• 5 years ago

Money managers hate him! This guy invested in the Taboola IPO and you won't believe what happened next!

shreyshrey• 5 years ago

So how many will buy this stock (TBLA) thinking it is TSLA?

555552• 5 years ago

Pump your stock price with this one weird trick (Hint: it's lying).

He says the company's main competition is "anyone in business of offering software revenue tools to publishers," including CMS providers, email servers, etc.
Singolda tells Axios that he sees any sort of open web device, whether it being a smart refrigerator or a smart TV, one day being able to use Taboola's technology to power content recommendations.
Taboola relies mostly on artificial intelligence to power content recommendations

finiteloops• 5 years ago

Fairly certain the "artificial intelligence" they're describing are the rotten brains of anyone who works for that company.

ourcat2• 5 years ago

I'd say it's more like they're getting search data from Google.

eg: I search on some medical condition (which I might or might not have) and the next thing I know, all Taboola 'chumbox' blocks are littered with 'ads' (which aren't ads that 'sell' anything) about said condition. Just extremely low quality links with zero value.

fooblat• 5 years ago

Taboola, Zergnet, Outbrain, and the like are half the reason I run a pihole. These companies and their ilk promote the worst of the worst of clickbait.

yalogin• 5 years ago

Oh wow didn't know this is the company behind those annoying ads. On some sites, fivethirtyeight, its a infinite scroll list too. The worst thing I ever encountered. May be they fixed it now but it forced me to actually sign up for a fake email account and send an email to their staff about it.

Its amazing that they are worth 2.4B dollars though. I get it that its used on almost every site but still seems a lot. Our estimates of value have been severely distorted by the last year. Not sure if things will ever go down or if its the new normal.

flixic• 5 years ago

Can't wait for their S-1 filing. For a business as distasteful as this, there should be quite a few gems and interesting risks.

rattray4• 5 years ago

I don't think there will be one, since they're doing a SPAC merger. They're not doing an IPO, but rather merging with an empty holding company that's already done one.

r00fus2• 5 years ago

Is that a common exploit for going public?

perardi2• 5 years ago

Ahhhh, wonderful, joining the eminent, definitely not a scam at all, no sir, firms like Nikola Motors.

pradn• 5 years ago

I am being harsh, but this company is the equivalent of a chemical company that poisons the river. Sure, there's a benefit of revenue for publishers (powering journalism and other writing / photography / video), but it's so obnoxious and no where near anyone's idea of a worthwhile content. It's like praising litter for having been the product of a sale, benefiting whoever.

iujjkfjdkkdkf• 5 years ago

I like this analogy a lot. Nature has a special place for us so conservation is (mostly) obvious, including ideas like negative externalities. But I agree with you that we should be thinking of the online world in the same way, even if its not as existential as a clean environment. Companies that profit by destroying the value of the web, like Taboola and other listicle or content farms should be held accountable for lowering the internet's quality for everyone.

samdung• 5 years ago

an interesting reading on the economics of chumbox ads: https://themargins.substack.com/p/taboola-outbrain-and-the-c...

rattray4• 5 years ago

This was interesting, but didn't go deep enough - where do all these ads ultimately lead to $$ transactions? Do they only end up selling legit products that are advertised non-manipulatively, like the hearing aids?

arcturus17• 5 years ago

Taboola and Outbrain have disgusting products. Their recommendations lead to content that is sketchy at best, and their business model is to pry on the unsuspecting at scale. I would say there is no harm done in wasting people's time here and there, but I bet they're hyper-agressive in data collection and privacy violations.

These types of companies are the very definition of extractive elite: they provide close to nothing of value and yet soak up a bunch of profits in the hands of a few.

I'd be happy to hear someone refute my claims, especially the latter.

sjg0072• 5 years ago

I don't know how they make money...

ceejayoz4• 5 years ago

They embed their ads on news sites, style them to look like legitimate articles, and prey on the vulnerable. Same methodology as the "your Social Security number has been suspended" scam calls.

dumpHero2• 5 years ago

If you see sketchy ads on a website that's not supposed to be sketchy. Its probably taboola or outbrain. They often use near NSFW images (sexual & gore) in their click baits. I remember a few years ago, they'd also install malware on your system to change the default search engine to a Google lookalike. There were numerous articles online on "how to remove taboola malware".

This company should be sued to death instead of going public. Our slow to catch up legislation is to blame.

joering22• 5 years ago

I couldn't upvote this enough. But if you know Adam a little bit as I do, you would know he is a perfect fit for a slimy garbage Taboola and Outbrain are delivering. Its not a surprise really. And mostly its snake oils sales crap that eventually should be outright banned.

IG_Semmelweiss• 5 years ago

I don't see taboola chumboxes with ublock on the "block all" setting, with FF, and gradually allow JS elements if needed. I used to like doing this with NoScript.

Sometimes I have to change browser for banking or specific shopping, and I have separate (non uBlock) browsers that i use strictly for work.

Reading the high level dislike of taboola, I wonder what is preventing people from using uBlock to zap Taboola?

gorhill• 5 years ago

Taboola is blocked by default in uBlock Origin.

projektfu• 5 years ago

I still don't understand why publishers use these ads. At best they annoy your readers. At worst people leave your site and give revenue or eyeballs somewhere else. Since publishers are in the impression business, shouldn't they be selling ads that make revenue by impression instead of by click? My dream is for publishers to wise up suddenly, leaving Taboola and its underwriters holding the bag.

ogre_codes2• 5 years ago

At best someone accidentally clicks on one of the little adverts and you earn $0.01. On a busy site, accidental clicks alone have to earn a few dollars a day.

ceejayoz4• 5 years ago

At the risk of your site's reputation, of course.

celestialcheese• 5 years ago

For big sites, you can negotiate 80% revshare + guaranteed minimums. This is huge for smoothing out cash-flow in low CPM quarters and is one of the most valuable ad slots available to pubs

cmorgan31• 5 years ago

They pay you a promised amount to clutter your website with their horseshit beyond a certain point because your data becomes the commodity being bought just not transparently. Now make the case constantly to get rid of the free cash by showing it's negative impact on brand and revenue. I hope that one day they are all gone but it will be awhile still...

TedDoesntTalk2• 5 years ago

Does anyone on HN actually LIKE taboos/outbrain recommendations? I hide them with ublock origin and completely ignore the ones that slip through.

alibrarydweller• 5 years ago

In case it's not obvious, Taboola hasn't been making money by connecting people to content they want to read, but rather by selling passive tracking data.

If a browser goes to ten sites which have Taboola boxes on them, then Taboola can sell the history of that cookie and its browsing history to a targeting company. If the targeting company has a cookie of its own in the same place as a chumbox then the company is able to map everything Taboola knows to everything they know.

Given the efforts of Apple, Google and Mozilla to choke off this type of tech (third party cookie tracking) it's interesting their valuation is this high. I guess they can still make much of counting anonymous visits and mapping them back to IPs for sale.

lopatin• 5 years ago

Not that they don't do this but I'm not sure selling data is their main source of money. I think their ad placements are actually that valuable. Click-bait sells extremely well when it's manipulative enough and displayed to a wealthy demographic. About 10 years ago you would pay $.1 to $1 for a click from a soccer mom on Fox News. That's not search ads, that $1 per non-targeted display ad click. Which was insane back then, not sure now. I've also not touched ads for a decade so maybe I'm just behind the times.

Edit: I actually credit Taboola and Outbrain with being the enablers of actual "fake news". There was a time when you could make a landing page that looks like the NYT, put an "advertisement" disclaimer in gray letters and 9pt font somewhere, and blast it on Taboola so people buy your supplements. Taboola was fully aware, just loved the money too much.

namdnay• 5 years ago

Taboola hasn't been making money by connecting people to content they want to read, but rather by selling passive tracking data

Where did you get this from? Have they published the relative revenues?

whoisjuan• 5 years ago

"5 signs that you're about to have stroke"... Shows a photo of something common like someone scratching their arm.

Taboola is the lowest of the lowest when it comes to advertising. 100% pure trash.

guyzero• 5 years ago

People complain about Google but Taboola is a hundred times more toxic with their garbage ads cluttering up the bottom half of so many media sites' pages. Being shown the same ad for shoes a hundred times the day after I bought them is nothing next to shock-image ads into content farms.

bserge• 5 years ago

the company has invested in hiring over 50 full-time human moderation

I just can't help but laugh at this. Over 50 people, so likely under 60. For a company serving 500 million daily active users and 1 trillion aids/month...

Just comedy gold.

And these people are on minimum wage, and we don't even know in what country. Churn rate ~90%/month. But that's just a side joke.

This is what people value, middlemen trading trash for cash.

$2.6 billion, fuck my whole life.

schwinn140• 5 years ago

Taboola, Outbrain, et al are the bottom of the barrel as it relates to the space of monetized and amplified content recommendations.

Literal clickbait designed to pray on the poorly informed.

From an advertising perspective, their targeting "AI" is nonsense.

The fact that they are cashing out isn't upsetting. The fact that countless, I would assume tens of millions of users, have been duped to click on this drudge is most disheartening.

tartoran3• 5 years ago

Honestly I'd be embarrassed if I were an engineer working for taboola/outbrain. It's a job yes, but I wouldn't advertise it to my friends at all.

rattray4• 5 years ago

It seems to me that services like Taboola are something like manipulation-laundering services, providing enough room between deception and a product sold to circumvent the FTC's truth in advertising rules.

Could someone with more knowledge comment - is that at all right? Is there more to it? Could rule tweaks at the FTC have an impact on this?

russellbeattie2• 5 years ago

If there is any company in the world that should be burned to the ground for the sake of all humanity, Taboola is definitely one of them. Outbrain is the other. I wish they had actually merged to save us the time of destroying both.

Their product is horrible and without redemption. But let me make it clear that the people that work there are also as horrible - try criticizing them on Twitter and watch the bots and employees attack.

They provide nothing of any value in any way whatsoever. It's pure scam. If they disappeared tomorrow the world would literally become a better place in real, measurable ways.

I've had a PiHole set up for years explicitly to block them. No other service I can imagine is built on such lies, falsehoods, deceit and fraud. They are pure garbage. Hatred doesn't even begin to describe my antipathy towards them.

Taboola employees reading this? You're all trash.

dredmorbius5• 5 years ago

Taboola and Outbrain were nearly the same company. A merger announced in 2019 fell through. Invalidating my "Save a match with this one weird trick!" joke.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/business/media/online-adv...

(I'd not read the update in the Axios article initially, apologies, and edited.)

russellbeattie2• 5 years ago

I had to do the same thing with my comment, actually. The deal just fell apart in September apparently.

We'll just have to use two matches.

"15 ways that fire bombing trash ad companies will improve our lives. Number 10 will shock you!"

gundmc2• 5 years ago

It's not an exaggeration to say that my opinion of a site drops dramatically when I see a trashy Tabula feed. I'm looking at you, Fivethirtyeight.

KoftaBob2• 5 years ago

Taboola and Outbrain are both purveyors of absolute garbage clickbait ads of the lowest quality.

The founders of those two companies are the modern day version of snake oil salesmen, and they know it. They probably don't care, since they're clearly motivated purely by greed, not by any sense of pride in what they're building.

I don't normally have opinions this strong about a company, but man do they take pride in insulting the intelligence of every user who sees their ads.

whalesalad• 5 years ago

It is remarkable to me that a company that produces so little value to the consumer is worth SO much. There is a LOT of cash to be made in the dark-pattern cracks of society.

r00fus2• 5 years ago

Possibly because digital policy doesn't seem to move quickly in the US. Taboola only exists because we don't have effective consumer policy and that's because we have a dysfunctional political system.

KoftaBob2• 5 years ago

"When the founders look back at their life and see "litter the internet with garbage" as their biggest accomplishment, I wonder if the money will be worth it."

Mc_Big_G• 5 years ago

Proving yet again that anyone can get rich as long as they don't have any morals.

erostrate• 5 years ago

Taboola relies on the open web for its existence, but by littering it with their garbage for a quick buck they are contributing to drive people towards walled gardens. It's a self-destructive company. It reminds me of this fishing technique where they scrape the whole ocean floor with huge nets, slowly destroying the whole ecosystem in order to get a few more low quality fish.

deeviant• 5 years ago

Is their plan to lure some investors into paying $2.6B for them to go away forever, for the betterment of mankind?

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

Taboola's content is trash, but people should consider why it is so: Google&FB have destroyed the ad industry so much that only this kind of predatory behavior can survive.

kgc• 5 years ago

Taboola is the scum of the internet. Their ads are all clickbait.

Jordrok• 5 years ago

Just adding to the dogpile here, but Taboola and Outbrain are the absolute scum of the Earth.

Google, Facebook, and others get a lot of justified criticism for abusive business practices and invasion of privacy, but at least they also provide some kind of arguably valuable service in return. Taboola and Outbrain on the other hand are malignant parasites, utterly devoid of any imaginable redeeming qualities.

If I could flip a switch and erase both companies from existence, I would absolutely do it without a moment's hesitation.

Taboola to go public at $2.6B valuation

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